Whenever it was possible, Bettina kept her arm linked in Peggy’s, for Peggy was such a sensible person she seldom suffered from imaginative fears. However, Peggy’s attention was absorbed, whenever the young man could manage it, by Howard Brent. He seemed to like Peggy’s straightforwardness and her fearless, original comments on everything that interested her.
Ralph Marshall and Terry Benton devoted themselves to Sally Ashton and Gerry Williams, except when they deserted the girls to talk to Mrs. Burton. And this they seemed to do as often as it was possible.
Although Ralph Marshall had been to camp two or three times since the evening of the dance, Bettina had never talked to him again alone. She was polite, of course, because of her mother’s wishes, but it was idle to attempt a friendship with any human being with whom one felt so uncongenial. His somewhat flippant comments on the Indian preparations they were witnessing annoyed Bettina.
Nevertheless she wondered how she could have ever believed that she would be attracted by the life and customs of the Indians. If they were a peaceful semicivilized tribe, their appearance belied it. Bettina did not understand that the Snake Festival, which they expected to witness that day, was the strangest and most incomprehensible of all the religious ceremonies of the western Indians.
The morning songs had been sung; the race of the young Indian warriors, from the plain to the mesa to obtain the consecrated objects to place in their fields of corn, had taken place.
There would be nothing further of importance until toward noon.
Therefore, the Sunrise Camp Fire party was wandering about, not knowing exactly what to do next.
They were standing in front of an Indian house which looked a little handsomer than the others, when the door opened and a young man came out.
He was really splendid in appearance, for he was not costumed in the fantastic fashion of the other braves. He wore a shirt of a wonderful shade of blue—the dye once made by the Hopi Indians—but now almost unknown, leather trousers, an embroidered belt, and moccasins bound about his legs with strips of leather. In his belt there was a beautiful hand-made javelin or dagger with a hilt of unpolished jewels, turquoise and topaz and sapphires. His face and body were unpainted, but about his head was a circle of gray and white feathers fastened to a band on which was set in jewels a design meant to represent the rising sun. And the young man’s figure was nearly perfect and his skin of light bronze.
He would have moved on, merely bowing gravely to his friends, for they of course immediately recognized him, except that Mrs. Burton impetuously spoke. She was really filled with admiration and also with amazement. Could it be possible that a man with the education and apparently the intellect the young Indian had, could take part in a ceremony which one knew to be as revolting to civilized ideas as the Snake dance?