"How mild and good they all look!" said Aunt Maria. "They put me in mind somehow of Shenstone's pastorals. How humanizing a pastoral life is, to be sure! On the whole, I admire their way of not shearing their sheep alive. It isn't stupidity, but goodness of heart. A most amiable people!"
"Jest so," assented Glover. "How it must go ag'in the grain with 'em to take a skelp when it comes in the way of dooty! A man oughter feel willin' to be skelped by sech tender-hearted critters."
"Pshaw!" said Aunt Maria. "I don't believe they ever scalp anybody—unless it is in self-defence."
"Dessay. Them fellers that went down to fight the Apaches was painted up's savage's meat-axes. Probably though 'twas to use up some 'f their paint that was a wastin'. Equinomical, I sh'd say."
Mrs. Stanley did not see her way clear to comment either upon the fact or the inference. There were times when she did not understand Glover, and this was one of the times. He had queer twistical ways of reasoning which often proved the contrary of what he seemed to want to prove; and she had concluded that he was a dark-minded man who did not always know what he was driving at; at all events, a man not invariably comprehensible by clear intellects.
Her attention was presently engaged by a stir in the pueblo. Great things were evidently at hand; some spectacle was on the point of presentation; what was it? Aunt Maria guessed marriage, and Captain Glover guessed a war-dance; but they had no argument, for the skipper gave in. Meantime the Moquis, men, women, and children, all dressed in their gayest raiment, were gathering in groups on the landings and in the square. Presently there was a crowd, a thousand or fifteen hundred strong; at last appeared the victims, the performers, or whatever they were.
"Dear me!" murmured Aunt Maria. "Twenty weddings at once! I hope divorce is frequent."
Twenty men and twenty women advanced to the centre of the plaza in double file and faced each other.
The dance began; the performers furnished their own music; each rolled out a deep aw aw aw under his visor.
"Sounds like a swarm of the biggest kind of blue-bottle flies inside the biggest kind 'f a sugar hogset," was Glover's description.