For a dozen breaths this quiet reigned. Then Wiki rose, bowed low to that monstrous idol and stepped to the vast yellow pumpkin, sitting serenely upon its hurdle. He extended his paho before Massi's unseeing eyes, recited briefly a prayer—and rapped the pumpkin once. A sigh of anticipation burst from the audience. The pumpkin fell apart, dividing cleanly in quarters, and from its hollow shell stepped Kachina, a lithe bronze statue came to life, clad from breast to thighs in a sheath of turkey-feathers that puffed out under her arms in a mockery of wings. Her blue-black hair floated free beneath the confining band of serpent's-skin around her brow.
For an instant she poised in the fallen shell of the pumpkin, arms spread as though for flight. Then she leaped—almost, it seemed, she flew—from the hurdle to the sand, swooped this way and that, always with the gliding, wavy motion of a bird on the wing, hovered before Wiki, before Angwusi, sank in a pretty pose of piety before Massi's warped face, and so sped into the measures of a dance that was all grace and fire and vivid emotion, a dance no Indian could have done, and which charmed her beholders by its very exotic spell, its fierce bursts of passion, demonstrative, seductive.
Kokyan made no secret of its effect upon him. The gloomy face of the young priest was lit by the unholy fires that burned within him. He came from his place at the head of the snake priests and stood with Wiki and Angwusi by the wooden idol, his eyes drinking in the sinuous loveliness of the dancer, her slender, naked feet scarcely touching the sand as she leaped and postured from mood to mood, her own eyes flaring through the tossing net of her hair, her lips pouting, smiling, luring, challenging, repulsing.
But I had little chance to observe her influence upon the Priest of Yoki. Beside me Tawannears was risen to his knees and in his face was the look of the damned man who sees heaven's gates opening for him, doubting, trusting, unbelieving, paralyzed by joy, scorched by fear. He started to clamber to his feet and the people in back of us volleyed low protests. I seized his arm.
"Sit," I adjured him. "What ails you, man?"
I think he did not even hear me.
"Use your wits," I exclaimed irritably. "You will have us all slain. You can see the maid anon."
'Twas Peter gave me the key to his state.
"He t'inks she is Gahano," he muttered. "Ja, dot's idt."
I exerted all my strength, and dragged the Seneca back to his haunches.