Even as she spoke they could see the people coming out of the Cliff dwellings and the priests going into the kivas preparing for the journey.
That was how it was; when any animal spoke of the country he knew best, that was what the children saw. And yet all the time there was the beginning of the buffalo trail in front of them, and around them, drawn there by that something of himself which every man puts into the work of his hands, the listening tribesmen. One of these spoke now in answer to Moke-icha.
"Also in my part of the country," he said, "long before there were Pale Faces, there were trade trails and graded ways, and walled ways between village and village. We traded for cherts as far south as Little River in the Tenasas Mountains, and north to the Sky-Blue Water for copper which was melted out of rocks, and there were workings at Flint Ridge that were older than the great mound at Cahokia."
"Oh," cried both the children at once, "Mound-Builders!"--and they stared at him with interest.
He was probably not any taller than the other Indians, but seemed so on account of his feather headdress which was built up in front with a curious cut-out copper ornament. They thought they recognized the broad banner stone of greenish slate which he carried, the handle of which was tasseled with turkey beards and tiny tails of ermine. He returned the children's stare in the friendliest possible fashion, twirling his banner stone as a policeman does his night stick.
"Were you? Mound-Builders, you know?" questioned Oliver.
"You could call us that. We called ourselves Tallegewi, and our trails were old before the buffalo had crossed east of the Missi-Sippu, the Father of all Rivers. Then the country was full of the horned people, thick as flies in the Moon of Stopped Waters." As he spoke, he pointed to the moose and wapiti trooping down the shallow hills to the watering-places. They moved with a dancing motion, and the multitude of their horns was like a forest walking, a young forest in the spring before the leaves are out and there is a clicking of antlered bough on bough. "They would come in twenty abreast to the licks where we lay in wait for them," said the Tallega. "They were the true trail-makers."
"Then you must have forgotten what I had to do with it," said a voice that seemed to come from high up in the air, so that they all looked up suddenly and would have been frightened at the huge bulk, if the voice coming from it in a squeaky whisper had not made it seem ridiculous. It was the Mastodon, who had strolled in from the pre-historic room, though it was a wonder to the children how so large a beast could move so silently.
"Hey," said a Lenni-Lenape, who had sat comfortably smoking all this time, "I've heard of you--there was an old Telling of my father's--though I hardly think I believed it. What are you doing here?"
"I've a perfect right to come," said the Mastodon, shuffling embarrassedly from foot to foot. "I was the first of my kind to have a man belonging to me, and it was I that showed him the trail to the sea."