The Trial of Lovers
Or, The Maiden of Mátsaki and the Red Feather
(Told the First Night)
In the days of the ancients, when Mátsaki was the home of the children of men, there lived, in that town, which is called “Salt City,” because the Goddess of Salt made a white lake there in the days of the New, a beautiful maiden. She was passing beautiful, and the daughter of the priest-chief, who owned more buckskins and blankets than he could hang on his poles, and whose portholes were covered with turquoises and precious shells from the ocean—so many were the sacrifices he made to the gods. His house was the largest in Mátsaki, and his ladder-poles were tall and decorated with slabs of carved wood—which you know was a great thing, for our grandfathers cut with the tímush or flint knife, and even tilled their cornfields with wooden hoes sharpened with stone and weighted with granite. That’s the reason why all the young men in the towns round about were in love with the beautiful maiden of Salt City.
Now, there was one very fine young man who lived across the western plains, in the Pueblo of the Winds. He was so filled with thoughts of the maiden of Mátsaki that he labored long to gather presents for her, and looked not with favor on any girl of his own pueblo.
One morning he said to his fathers: “I have seen the maiden of Mátsaki; what think ye?”
“Be it well,” said the old ones. So toward night the young man made a bundle of mantles and necklaces, which he rolled up in the best and whitest buckskin he had. When the sun was setting he started toward Mátsaki, and just as the old man’s children had gathered in to smoke and talk he reached the house of the maiden’s father and climbed the ladder. He lifted the corner of the mat door and shouted to the people below—“Shé!”
“Hai!” answered more than a pair of voices from below.
“Pull me down,” cried the young man, at the same time showing his bundle through the sky-hole.
The maiden’s mother rose and helped the young man down the ladder, and as he entered the firelight he laid the bundle down.
“My fathers and mothers, my sisters and friends, how be ye these many days?” said he, very carefully, as though he were speaking to a council.
“Happy! Happy!” they all responded, and they said also: “Sit down; sit down on this stool,” which they placed for him in the firelight.
“My daughter,” remarked the old man, who was smoking his cigarette by the opposite side of the hearth-place, “when a stranger enters the house of a stranger, the girl should place before him food and cooked things.” So the girl brought from the great vessel in the corner fresh rolls of héwe, or bread of cornflour, thin as papers, and placed them in a tray before the young man, where the light would fall on them.
“Eat!” said she, and he replied, “It is well.” Whereupon he sat up very straight, and placing his left hand across his breast, very slowly took a roll of the wafer bread with his right hand and ate ever so little; for you know it is not well or polite to eat much when you go to see a strange girl, especially if you want to ask her if she will let you live in the same house with her. So the young man ate ever so little, and said, “Thank you.”
“Eat more,” said the old ones; but when he replied that he was “past the naming of want,” they said, “Have eaten,” and the girl carried the tray away and swept away the crumbs.
“Well,” said the old man, after a short time, “when a stranger enters the house of a stranger, it is not thinking of nothing that he enters.”
“Why, that is quite true,” said the youth, and then he waited.
“Then what may it be that thou hast come thinking of?” added the old man.
“I have heard,” said the young man, “of your daughter, and have seen her, and it was with thoughts of her that I came.”
Just then the grown-up sons of the old man, who had come to smoke and chat, rose
