“Listen, my child!” said the old man after they had gone away, turning toward his daughter, who was sitting near the wall and looking down at the beads on her belt fringe. “Listen! You have heard what the young man has said. What think you?”
“Why! I know not; but what should I say but ‘Be it well,’ ” said the girl, “if thus think my old ones?”
“As you may,” said the old man; and then he made a cigarette and smoked with the young man. When he had thrown away his cigarette he said to the mother: “Old one, is it not time to stretch out?”
So when the old ones were asleep in the corner, the girl said to the youth, but in a low voice: “Only possibly you love me. True, I have said ‘Be it well’; but before I take your bundle and say ‘thanks,’ I would that you, to prove that you verily love me, should go down into my cornfield, among the lands of the priest-chief, by the side of the river, and hoe all the corn in a single morning. If you will do this, then shall I know you love me; then shall I take of your presents, and happy we will be together.”
“Very well,” replied the young man; “I am willing.”
Then the young girl lighted a bundle of cedar splints and showed him a room which contained a bed of soft robes and blankets, and, placing her father’s hoe near the door, bade the young man “wait happily unto the morning.”
So when she had gone he looked at the hoe and thought: “Ha! if that be all, she shall see in the morning that I am a man.”
At the peep of day over the eastern mesa he roused himself, and, shouldering the wooden hoe, ran down to the cornfields; and when, as the sun was coming out, the young girl awoke and looked down from her housetop, “Aha!” thought she, “he is doing well, but my children and I shall see how he gets on somewhat later. I doubt if he loves me as much as he thinks he does.”
So she went into a closed room. Down in the corner stood a water jar, beautifully painted and as bright as new. It looked like other water jars, but it was not. It was wonderful, wonderful! for it was covered with a stone lid which held down many mayflies and gnats and mosquitoes. The maiden lifted the lid and began to speak to the little animals as though she were praying.
“Now, then, my children, this day fly ye forth all, and in the cornfields by the river there shall ye see a young man hoeing. So hard is he working that he is stripped as for a race. Go forth and seek him.”
“Tsu‑nu‑nu‑nu,” said the flies, and “Tsi‑ni‑ni‑ni,” sang the gnats and mosquitoes; which meant “Yes,” you know.
“And,” further said the girl, “when ye find him, bite him, his body all over, and eat ye freely of his blood; spare not his armpits, neither his neck nor his eyelids, and fill his ears with humming.”
And again the flies said, “Tsu‑nu‑nu‑nu,” and the mosquitoes and gnats, “Tsi‑ni‑ni‑ni.” Then, nu‑u‑u, away they all flew like a cloud of sand on a windy morning.
“Blood!” exclaimed the young man. He wiped the sweat from his face and said, “The gods be angry!” Then he dropped his hoe and rubbed his shins with sand and slapped his sides. “Atu!” he yelled; “what matters—what in the name of the Moon Mother matters with these little beasts that cause thoughts?” Whereupon, crazed and restless as a spider on hot ashes, he rolled in the dust, but to no purpose, for the flies and gnats and mosquitoes sang “hu‑n‑n” and “tsi‑ni‑ni” about his ears until he grabbed up his blanket and breakfast, and ran toward the home of his fathers.
“Wa‑ha ha! Ho o!” laughed a young man in the Tented Pueblo to the north, when he heard how the lover had fared. “Shoom!” he sneered. “Much of a man he must have been to give up the maid of Mátsaki for mayflies and gnats and mosquitoes!” So on the very next morning, he, too, said to his old ones: “What a fool that little boy must have been. I will visit the maiden of Mátsaki. I’ll show the people of Pínawa what a Hámpasawan man can do. Courage!”—and, as the old ones said “Be it well,” he went as the other had gone; but, pshaw! he fared no better.
After some time, a young man who lived in the River Town heard about it and laughed as hard as the youth of the Tented Pueblo had. He called the two others fools, and said that “girls were not in the habit of asking much when one’s bundle was large.” And as he was a young man who had everything, he made a bundle of presents as large as he could carry; but it did him no good. He, too, ran away from the mayflies and gnats and mosquitoes.
Many days passed before anyone else would try again to woo the maiden of Mátsaki. They did not know, it is true, that she was a Passing Being; but others had failed all on account of mosquitoes and mayflies and little black gnats, and had been more satisfied with shame than a full hungry man with food. “That is sick satisfaction,” they would say to one another, the fear of which made them wait to see what others would do.
Now, in the Ant Hill, which was named Hálonawan,1 lived a handsome young man, but he was poor, although the son
