“Yes, when you are Ruler. How will you make that happen?”
“All these days I have been thinking the thoughts how. If the moon brought me to you, that means that my father was not like others;––not like mesa men.”
“No––not like mesa men!” she breathed softly.
Mo-wa-thé was very pretty and very slender. Tahn-té was always sure no other mother was so pretty,––and as she spoke now her dark eyes were beautified by some memory,––and the boy saw that he was momentarily forgotten in some dream of her own.
“No one but me shall gather the wood for the night fire to light Po-se-yemo back from the south lands,” he said as he rose to his feet and stood straight and decided before his mother. “The moon will help me, and your white god will help me, and when he sees the blaze and comes back, you will tell him it was his son who kept the fire!”
He took from his girdle the downy feather of an 14 eagle, stepped outside to the edge of the mesa and with a breath sent it beyond him into space. A current of air caught it and whirled it upwards in token that the prayer was accepted by Those Above.
And inside the doorway, Mo-wa-thé, watching, let fall the medicine bowl at this added evidence that an enchanted day had come to the life of her son. Not anything he wanted to see could be hidden from him this day! Powerless, she knelt with bent head over the fragments of the sacred vessel––powerless against the gods who veil things––and who unveil things!
It was the next morning that Mo-wa-thé stood at the door of Ho-tiwa the Ancient one;––the spiritual head of the village.
“Come within,” he said, and she passed his daughters who were grinding corn between the stones, and singing the grinding song of the sunrise hour. They smiled at her as she passed, but with the smile was a deference they did not show the ordinary neighbor of the mesas in Hopi land.
The old man motioned her to a seat, and in silence they were in the prayer which belongs to Those Above when human things need counsel.