Säh-pah had said once that they might be devil things, and not god things, and Yahn had watched her chance, and emptied a jar of dirty water on her head for that, and no more women said things of the walls of Yahn Tsyn-deh’s house. But whether she deemed them holy or not holy, she hung the necklace of birds’ claws under the symbol of the Goddess Stenaht-lihan, and then prostrated herself and lay in silence.
After a long time she spoke.
“All this that the Apache blood be not lost in the flood of a shame! All this that no Te-hua woman ever again sees that my heart has been sick––all this that a double curse of––”
But in the midst of her words of whispered prayer speech failed her––and tears choked her until she sobbed for breath. With all her will she wished to curse some one whom all her woman’s heart forbade her harm!
CHAPTER X
SHRINES OF THE SACRED PLACES
When new things cast shadows across the Indian mind, every cloud touching the moon is watched at its birth and at its first hours of the circle, also the stars. And for those other worlds,––the planets––is it their brotherhood to the earth that is sealed by a living sacrifice as they come and as they pass again from the visible path in the sky?
The Reader of the Stars lives often above the mists of the earth dews. The door of the high priest Po-Ahtun-ho faces the way of the South that the shadows of the moon and the shadows also of the sun, make reckonings for him of that which must be noted. So it has been since ancient days.