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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.
But the Navajo need not have made fun of the Cliff-Dwellers for praying to a puma, since the Navajos of to-day still say their prayers to the bear. The Navajos are a wandering tribe, and pretend to despise all people who live in fixed dwellings. The "ghosts of prayer plumes," which Moke-icha saw in the sky, is the Milky Way.
I had tasted blood of my master's enemies; also Kokomo was afraid, and that is an offense to me. I dropped from where I lay ... I had come to my full weight ... I think his back was broken. "It is the Way Things Are," said Moke-icha. "Kokomo had let in the Dine to kill Pitahaya to make himself chief, and he would have killed Tse-tse for finding out about it. That I saw and smelled in him.
"I have heard," he said, "that when the Pale Faces came into the country they found no better roads anywhere than the buffalo traces " "Also," purred Moke-icha, "I have heard that they found trails through lands where no buffalo had been before them."
"It was deep and polished even in my day," said Moke-icha, "but that did not interest me. There was no kill there larger than rabbits, and when I had seen the men cast prayer plumes on the Sacred Water and begin to scrape up the salt for their packs, I went back to Ty-uonyi. It was not until I got back to Lasting Water that I picked up the trail of the Dine.
"Softly," said Moke-icha. "Though I slept in the kivas and am called Kabeyde, Chief of the Four-Footed, I did not know all the tales of the Queres. They were a very ancient people. On the Salt Trail, where it passed by Split Rock, the trail was bitten deep into the granite. I think they could not have been more than three or four hundred years in Ty-uonyi when I knew them.
" Dorcas Jane began to say and broke off. "Tell us what it was!" she finished. Moke-icha considered. "Breast of turkey roasted, and rabbit stew with pieces of squash and chia, and beans cooked in fat, very good eating; and of course thin, folded cakes of maize; though I do not care much for corn cakes unless they are well greased.
"Now I recall a trail in that country," said Moke-icha, "that was older than the oldest father's father of them could remember. Four times a year the People of the Cliffs went down on it to the Sacred Water, and came back with bags of salt on their shoulders."
"You see," explained Moke-icha to the children, "if he wanted to be made a member of the Warrior Band, it wouldn't help him any to be proved a bad scout, and a bringer of false alarms. And if he could be elected to the Uakanyi that spring, he would probably be allowed to go on the salt expedition between corn-planting and the first hoeing.
"And the twang of the bowstring and the thrashing about of the kill in the thicket would have told Tse-tse exactly where they were," said the Navajo. "The Dine when they hunt man do not turn aside for a puma." "The hardest part of it all," said Moke-icha, "was to keep from showing I winded him.
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