noon of the sun there were never any left in the
campoodie but these or some mother of weanlings, and they sat to keep
the ashes warm upon the hearth. If it were cold, they burrowed in the
blankets of the hut; if it were warm, they followed the shadow of the
wickiup around. Stir much out of their places they hardly dared, since
one might not help another; but they called, in high, old cracked
voices, gossip and reminder across the ash heaps.

Then, if they have your speech or you theirs, and have an hour to spare,
there are things to be learned of life not set down in any books, folk
tales, famine tales, love and long-suffering and desire, but no
whimpering. Now and then one or another of the blind keepers of the camp
will come across to where you sit gossiping, tapping her way among the
kitchen middens, guided by your voice that carries far in the clearness
and stillness of mesa afternoons. But suppose you find Seyavi retired
into the privacy of her blanket, you will get nothing for that day.
There is no other privacy possible in a campoodie. All the processes of
life are carried on out of doors or behind the thin, twig-woven walls of
the wickiup, and laughter is the only corrective for behavior. Very
early the Indian learns to possess his countenance in impassivity, to
cover his head with his blanket. Something to wrap around him is as
necessary to the Paiute as to you your closet to pray in.

So in her blanket Seyavi, sometime basket maker, sits by the unlit
hearths of her tribe and digests her life, nourishing her spirit against
the time of the spirit's need, for she knows in fact quite as much of
these matters as you who have a larger hope, though she has none but the
certainty that having borne herself courageously to this end she will
not be reborn a coyote.

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

All streets of the mountains lead to the citadel; steep or slow they go
up to the core of the hills. Any trail that goes otherwhere must dip and
cross, sidle and take chances. Rifts of the hills open into each other,
and the high meadows are often wide enough to be called valleys by
courtesy; but one keeps this distinction in mind,--valleys are the
sunken places of the earth, canons are scored out by the glacier ploughs
of God. They have a better name in the Rockies for these hill-fenced
open glades of pleasantness; they call them parks. Here and there in the
hill country one comes upon blind gullies fronted by high ston