Christian fiction; Clergy -- Fiction; Historical fiction; New Mexico -- Fiction
Retracing his steps to the settlement, Father Latour found Eusabio
seated beside his doorway, singing in the Navajo language and beating
softly on one end of his long drum. Before him two very little Indian
boys, about four and five years old, were dancing to the music, on the
hard beaten ground. Two women, Eusabio's wife and sister, looked on from
the deep twilight of the hut.
The little boys did not notice the stranger's approach. They were
entirely engrossed in their occupation, their faces serious, their
chocolate-coloured eyes half closed. The Bishop stood watching the
flowing, supple movements of their arms and shoulders, the sure rhythm
of their tiny moccasined feet, no larger than cottonwood leaves, as
without a word of instruction they followed the irregular and
strangely-accented music. Eusabio himself wore an expression of
religious gravity. He sat with the drum between his knees, his broad
shoulders bent forward; a crimson _banda_ covered his forehead to hold
his black hair. The silver on his dark wrists glittered as he stroked
the drum-head with a stick or merely tapped it with his fingers. When he
finished the song he was singing, he rose and introduced the little
boys, his nephews, by their Indian names, Eagle Feather and Medicine
Mountain, after which he nodded to them in dismissal. They vanished into
the house. Eusabio handed the drum to his wife and walked away with his
guest.
"Eusabio," said the Bishop, "I want to send a letter to Father Vaillant,
at Tucson. I will send Jacinto with it, provided you can spare me one of
your people to accompany me back to Santa Fé."
"I myself will ride with you to the Villa," said Eusabio. The Navajos
still called the capital by its old name.
Accordingly, on the following morning, Jacinto was dispatched southward,
and Father Latour and Eusabio, with their pack-mule, rode to the east.
The ride back to Santa Fé was something under four hundred miles. The
weather alternated between blinding sand-storms and brilliant sunlight.
The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was
monotonous and still,--and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more
than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet,
but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of
stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills
under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth
was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far
away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the
sky, the sky!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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