"When he came to Hidden-under-the-Mountain he left his dogs behind, for he said, 'Howkawanda is a dead man to them.' In the Buffalo Country he was known as Two-Friended, and that was his name afterward. He was dressed after the fashion of that country, with a great buffalo robe that covered him, and his face was painted. So he came to Hidden-under-the-Mountain as a stranger and made signs to them. And when they had fed him, and sat him in the chief place as was the custom with strangers, he took the writing from under his robe to give it to the People of the Dry Washes. There was a young woman near by nursing her child, and she gave a sudden sharp cry, for she was the one that had been his maiden, and under the edge of his robe she saw his scars. But when Howkawanda looked hard at her she pretended that the child had bitten her." Dorcas Jane and Oliver drew a long breath when they saw that, so far as the rest of the audience was concerned, the story was finished. There were a great many questions they wished to ask,--as to what became of Howkawanda after that, and whether the People of the Dry Washes ever found their way into the Buffalo Country,--but before they could begin on them, the Bull Buffalo stamped twice with his fore-foot for a sign of danger. Far down at the other end of the gallery they could hear the watchman coming. [Illustration] VI DORCAS JANE HEARS HOW THE CORN CAME TO THE VALLEY OF THE MISSI-SIPPU; TOLD BY THE CORN WOMAN It was one of those holidays, when there isn't any school and the Museum is only opened for a few hours in the afternoon, that Dorcas Jane had come into the north gallery of the Indian room where her father was at work mending the radiators. This was about a week after the children's first adventure on the Buffalo Trail, but it was before the holes had been cut in the Museum wall to let you look straight across the bend in the Colorado and into the Hopi pueblo. Dorcas looked at all the wall cases and wondered how it was the Indians seemed to have so much corn and so many kinds of it, for she had always thought of corn as a civilized sort of thing to have. She sat on a bench against the wall wondering, for the lovely clean stillness of the room encouraged thinking, and the clink of her father's hammers on the pipes fell presently into the regular _tink-tink-a-tink_ of tortoise-shell rattles, keeping time to the shuffle and beat of bare feet on the dancing-place by the river. The path to it led across a clearing between little hillocks of freshly turned earth, and the high forest overhead was bursting into tiny green darts of growth like flame. The rattles were sewed to the leggings of the women--little yellow and black land-tortoise shells filled with pebbles--who sang as they danced and cut themselves with flints until they bled. "Oh," said Dorcas, without waiting to be introduced, "what makes you do that?"