[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