November the 12th, Spanish festival of St. Iago, festival of the war cry by which the country was conquered, Saint Iago a ellos,—Up and at them, St. James! was the great day at Jemez. It was a bleak Sunday morning and the stark, jagged hills, pedestals of rock, standing places which encompass the dark village were lit by radii of a flashing sunrise. Silhouetted up there stood solitary Indians, watching religiously, and they remained till night had fled and the living sanguine of the mountains was revealed. Down below, in the streets of the pueblo, you would think there were a hundred wild horses. For the visiting Indians, unable to find stabling, had turned their horses loose, and they ran about like dogs, hunting for provender, whinnying to one another, biting one another, kicking, scampering from yard to yard. Our three horses were set upon by droves which I sought to keep off whilst they ate.
Usually in the morning the Jemez Indians dance a horse dance—very fitting in such a place of horses—one Indian is made up as a horse, and he is accompanied by a drummer with a soot-colored face, and a naked mirth-maker. And these parade the mud-built town. But this year that dance was omitted.
Instead the traders and the Navajos chaffered over the price of blankets. Snowflakes fell indolently on to the gray streets, on to the horses' backs, on to the many hogs, on to the quaint mud domes of the bread ovens, the estufas, in front of the houses, but it settled most of all on the gorgeous handwoven blankets of the Navajos. Every year hundreds of Navajos ride in from their country, which lies between the Jemez River and the Grand Cañon, and bring a years' product in woven blankets, and there come to meet them here many Indians from Santo Domingo. For the Domingo Indians mine turquoise, and are clever craftsmen in silver. The Navajos want silver and turquoise ornaments; the Domingans want blankets. So a great barter takes place. Besides these, the white trader comes and buys in dozens and makes many profitable deals.
"Don't tell anybody," said Mrs. Babbitt. "I've brought these parrot feathers. Don't you think I might get a bracelet with them?"
And she did.
Meanwhile from a squatters' village came a meager crowd of Mexicans in black, and filled the seats of the little Indian church, and gave to the fiesta the appearance of a Christian festival. A priest also appeared and a Roman Mass was sung. A group of Mexican youths with guns waited to fire a volley in air at the elevation of the Host—but they were discouraged and took to random firing instead.
"I think we'd better give these fellows a wide berth," said Ewart, as he watched the way they were fooling with their rifles.
They were neither pious nor careful, for they continued taking shots at sparrows and crows while the figures of St. Iago and the emblems of the Church were carried past them in procession.
Curiously irrelevant seemed the diminutive, black-dressed procession, following a white-surpliced priest, a man with a lantern, a man with a Cross, and two men with figures of the Saint, a Mexican carrying a modern, machine-made St. James and an Indian carrying the original Indian-made image of wood. The Navajos, all between six and seven feet tall, swathed from head to ankles in voluminous, bright colored blankets, looked exceedingly morosely at the spectacle, only their dark, cavernous eyes staring from faces which they covered even to their noses with the flaps of their blankets. The wind blew, the dust rose, the snow came slanting down, and the black-robed Mexicans turned their faces away as they trudged. The Cross and the flickering lantern wavered in air as they went.
There met them, accidentally, the heralds of the dance, the ugliest and squattest of the Jemez Indians, their faces blackened out with soot, and bearing in their hands tiny, home-made drums which they beat with a will. The tom-tom was beaten by two of them, and a third, with widely dilated eyes and old, strained, carved-out face and flying hair, sang in pagan voice—Hoi hoi ho-ho, ha-ha-ha-ha. The Church went one way; they went another, without a salute, as if one were invisible to the other.