neighbor!'

"And what happened to him?"

"Oh, a plague of sores, a scolding wife," or anything that she chanced
to remember from the time she had been Given-to-the-Sun. _That_ stopped
them. But most of them held us to be under the protection of the Corn
Spirit, and when our Shaman would disappear for two or three days--that
was when she went to the mountain to visit Shungakela--_we_ said that
she had gone to pray to her own gods, and they accepted that also."

"And all this time no one recognized her?"

"She had painted her face for a Shaman," said the Corn Woman slowly,
"and besides it was nearly forty years. The woman who had been kind to
her was dead and there was a new Priest of the Sun. Only the one who had
painted her with the sign of the Sun was left, and he was doddering."
She seemed about to go on with her story, but the oldest dancing woman
interrupted her.

"Those things helped," said the dancing woman, "but it was her thought
which hid her. She put on the thought of a Shaman as a man puts on the
thought of a deer or a buffalo when he goes to look for them. That which
one fears, that it is which betrays one. She was a Shaman in her heart
and as a Shaman she appeared to them."

"She certainly had no fear," said the Corn Woman, "though from the first
she must have known--

"It was when the seed corn was gathered that we had the first hint of