Over and over, they repeated the name; it stirred memories; they laughed eagerly, and nodded their heads, and began to talk to me in Hopi, completely forgetting the interpreter. Then their faces sobered and sighs and inarticulate sounds were all that broke the silence for fully ten minutes. Then quietly the little grandmother turned to the interpreter and asked her to say to me, "He called me his sister." Silence again, and after a few minutes she went on with her stories. =Memories of a Hopi Centenarian,= as told by Dawavantsie "One of the first important things I can remember was when some Spanish soldiers came here. I don't know how old I was, but I had been married for several years, I think, for my first child had died. I was then living in this same old house. These Spaniards came from the direction of Keam's Canyon, and they passed on toward Oraibi. They did not come up onto this mesa at all, but just took corn and melons and whatever they wanted from the fields down below. "It was early one morning and I had gone with two other girls, cousins of mine, down to the spring at the foot of the mesa for water. These men came toward us, and we ran, but they caught us and started to take us away. I fought the man who was holding me and got loose and ran up the mesa trail faster than he could run. "I rolled rocks on them when they tried to come up and so they gave it up. I ran on up to the top of the mesa and gave the alarm and our men went to rescue the other two girls, but the Spaniards had horses and they got away with the girls, who have never been heard of to this day. "The Hopi had no horses in those days, but there were just a few burros. So the men followed on foot, but they could never catch them. There was a skirmish at Oraibi, too, over the stealing of girls. "One Walpi man in the fields was unable to keep them from taking his two girls, so he just had to give them up and he never saw them again. The poor father had few relations and had to go from house to house asking for food, for he was so grieved that he could never get along after that, but just was always worrying about his girls, and he died in less than a year. "After a long time other Spaniards came, and a young man who was down below the mesa, practicing for a race before sunrise, saw them and ran back and got enough men to go down and capture them. They kept their prisoners fastened in a room for a while and then the older men decided that they would not let them be killed although some wanted to; so they took them to some houses below the mesa--the place is still called Spanish Seat--and kept them there. "After a few weeks they let them go away. Some Hopi men were bribed to get some girls to go down off the mesa that day so these Spaniards could take them away with them.