d edges better to look at than the smooth
lines of the home dishes.

"Why can I not know what is that put into them?" he demanded.

"Only the Ancient Ruler and the medicine-men know the sacred thing for
'Those Above.'"

He wriggled like a beautiful bronze snake to the door and lay there,
his chin propped on his hands, staring out across the plain--six
hundred feet below their door--only a narrow ledge--scarcely the
length of the boy's body:--divided the wall of their home from the
edge of the rock mesa.

Mo-wa-the glanced at him from time to time.

"What thoughts do you think that you lie still like a kiva snake with
your eyes open?" she said at last.

"Yes, I think," he acknowledged with the gravity of a ceremonial
statement, "These days I am thinking thoughts--and on a day I will
tell them."

"When a boy has but few summers his thoughts are not yet his own,"
reminded Mo-wa-the.

"They are here--and here!" his slender brown hand touched his head,
and heart,--"How does any other take them out--with a knife? Are they
not me?"

"Boy! The old men shall take you to the kiva where all the youth of
the clan must be taught how to grow straight and think straight."

"Will they teach me there whose son I am?" he demanded.

Her head bent lower over the sacred bowl, but she made no lines. He
saw it, and crept closer.

"Am I an arrow to you?" he asked--"sometimes your face goes strange
like that, and I feel like an arrow,--I would rather be a bird with
only prayer feathers for you!"

She smiled wistfully and shook her head.

"You are a prayer;--one prayer all alone," she said at last. "I cannot
tell you that prayer, I only live for it."

"Is it a white god prayer?" he asked softly.

She put down the bowl and stared at him as at a witch or a sorcerer;--one
who made her afraid.

"I found at the shrine by the trail the head you made of the white
god," he whispered. "No one knows who made it but me. I saw you. I am
telling not any one. I am thinking all days of that god."

"That?"----

"Is it the great god Po-se-yemo, who went south?" he whispered. "Do
you make the prayer likeness that he may come back?"

"Yes, that he may come back!"

"My mother;--you make him white!"

She nodded her head.

"I am whiter than the other boys;--than all the boys!"

She picked up the bowl again and tried to draw lines on it with her
unsteady fingers.

"And you talk more than all the boys," she observed.

"Did the moon