To your own houses--all you who would fight!" she decided--"go fight
your own men if they send you away with gifts, but by my door I do not
want panthers who scream!"

Saeh-pah sulkily obeyed, and Yahn laughed and continued her work.

"It is not good to laugh when the bad fortune comes to any one," said
the old woman, but Yahn refused to be subdued.

"It is true, mother--" she insisted--(all elderly women are mothers or
aunts to village folk)--"it is true. When the dance of the corn was
here and the women made choice of their favorites--it is well known
that Saeh-pah did follow Phen-tza a long ways. He laughed at her." Yahn
herself laughed as she told it,--"he laughed and he asked why she
comes so far alone--and he gives her his blanket and goes away! That
is how he takes her for favorite that day!--he only laughs and let go
his blanket to Saeh-pah!"

The old woman put up her hand that her laugh be not heard. The
humor of primitive people is not a delicate thing, and that the
blandishments of Saeh-pah had been of no use--as was witness the
blanket!--had made many laugh around the night fires. Yet the old
"mother" thought it not good that quarrels should grow out of it.

"Is your heart so bright with happiness that you understand nothing of
the shame another woman may know, Yahn Tsyn-deh?"--she asked
seriously. "Saeh-pah is of the free woman--and we are not of her clan
to make judgement."

"Speak no words to me of a bright heart!" said Yahn, and arose, and
went away. Across the roofs she went to the stairway of her dwelling,
where she had lived alone since the death of her mother. It was a good
room she entered, very white on the walls, and the floor white also,
with the works of her own fingers on the smoothness of it. In a niche
of the thick wall stood a bronze god, and a medicine bowl with
serrated edges, and a serpent winged and crowned painted in fine lines
to encircle it. On the wall was a deerskin of intricate ornamentation,
good and soft in the dressing, it was painted in many symbols of the
Apache gods and the prayer thoughts. From her mother Yahn had learned
them and had painted them in ceremonial colors. The great goddess of
the white shell things--and white flowers--and white clouds--was
there, and the sun god was also there, and the curve of the moon with
the germ of life in its heart. The morning star was there--and also
the symbol of the messengers from the gods. Circling all these sacred
things was