There was other work, too, that must be done while the weather was warm and pleasant. New earthenware bowls must be made while they could be baked in the summer sun. Garments of soft, exquisitely wrought feather-cloth, and of fur strips wound on heavy cords and woven into fabric, must be made ready for cold weather. There were new rooms to be built, too, for the rapidly increasing population of the village made the old quarters too crowded for winter comfort. So the men brought great gray and brown rocks from the slopes of the canyon, carrying them suspended from head bands as the women carried their baskets. These were carefully chipped and dressed with the great stone mauls, and set evenly and squarely into place, held there by layers of mortar which no one except old Honau knew how to mix. Then the women made a thin, plaster-like cement from colored earths and spread it on with their hands, smoothing it down with many careful pats which left the prints of slender brown fingers in many places on the wet wall. Sometimes the rooms were brightened by wavy red and yellow lines running bandwise just below the ceiling; sometimes they were decorated with sacred symbols such as might bring a peculiar blessing to the household living in them. But always, whatever the inside might be, the outside was cunningly wrought to look like the forbidding walls of the cliff, gray, and dull yellow and brown, with here and there mottled patches of subdued red, so that an enemy might have hard work to spy them out in passing through the canyon below. It was nearly harvest time, and the corn was already ripening. Day after day the watcher in the field tower, keen-eyed Haida, had reported everything well, until the last lurking fears of even the old men were almost forgotten. The storerooms were being repaired and made ready for the new crop, and the men were working on a larger granary, or storage cist, some distance below the level of the cavern, where the heavy baskets of corn might be emptied without carrying them up the last steep third of the ascent. Then, early one morning, a wild-eyed messenger from the field tower came hurtling up the niche stairs in the gray light to report evil tidings. A band of savages, of what race he could not say, had ridden their fleet ponies down through the canyons that night, carrying off and trampling down a considerable part of the precious crop. And what was worse, they had raided the very tower itself and had left Haida, whose practised eyes had failed to see them in the moon-blinded lower trail, silent on his face with an arrow between his shoulders. The messenger himself had escaped only by dropping quickly into the farthest shadow of the adjoining shelter-room and lying motionless against the darkest wall until the last sound of the ponies’ drumming feet had died away in the distance.