be Moke-icha's story."

The great yellow cat came slipping out from the over-weighted thickets
of wild plum, and settled herself on her boulder with a bound.
Stretching forth one of her steel-tipped pads toward the south she
seemed to draw the purple distance as one draws a lady by her scarf. The
thin lilac-tinted haze parted on the gorge of the Rio Grande, between
the white ranges. The walls of the canon were scored with deep
perpendicular gashes as though the river had ripped its way through them
with its claws. Yellow pines balanced on the edge of the cliffs, and
smaller, tributary canons, that opened into it, widened here and there
to let in tall, solitary trees, with patches of sycamore and wild cherry
and linked pools for trout.

"That was a country!" purred Moke-icha. "What was it you wished to know
about it?"

"Ever so many things," said Oliver promptly--"if there were people
there, and if they had corn--"

"Queres they were called," said Moke-icha, "and they were already a
people, with corn of four colors for the four corners of the earth, and
many kinds of beans and squashes, when they came to Ty-uonyi."

"Where were they when the Corn Woman passed? Who were the Blanket
People, and what--"

"Softly," said Moke-icha. "Though I slept in the kivas and am called
Kabeyde, Chief of the Four-Footed, I did not know _all_ the tales of the
Queres. They were a very ancient people. On the Salt Trail, where it