The snowflakes, drifting through the smoke-hole, fell into the fire with little hisses. The even voice went on, telling the end.
“Slayer of Enemy Gods came to the Hunger People, they say …”
But it was not his dream, there was nothing portentous about this voice. Slim Girl had slain the Hunger People. He smiled and listened, cradled in drowsiness, distantly conscious of a louse biting him, and comforting himself with the thought that tomorrow all that would be attended to, tomorrow they would be home again. These poor people, they could not know. He half-opened his eyes, seeing his wife’s thoughtful, delicate face, and said, as sleepy people will, much louder than he realized,
“Hasché Lto’i!”
“What was that, Grandfather?” asked the man.
“Nothing.”
“I thought you said something about Hunting Goddess.”
“No, I said ‘hashké yei itei,’ the gods are brave.”
“Unh! That is well said.”
Slim Girl reflected. Hashché Lto’i was one of the few real goddesses, but she had nothing at all to do with the Coming Up story. He had covered his slip neatly, that man of hers. He was no child. They two would go far, far, under her direction.
The story-telling ended, and the flakes had ceased falling through the smoke-hole. Tomorrow would be clear. The banked fire became a dull redness, scarcely glowing.
III
They covered the fifteen miles home at a racing pace, on a morning of clear, brilliant air and dry, fresh snow. They both felt glorious, released from the cramped hogan, glad to be approaching their goal. Though she had no great endurance, Slim Girl rode well, and now, with their ponies prancing in the cold, played tricks and frolicked on horseback as Indian men and women rarely do together. They both yipped and waved their arms; she snatched his hat, and threw it for him to pick from the ground on the run; he swung low under his pony’s neck and sent an arrow skimming ahead of them. Before they reached it, the special quality and privacy of their home reached out to them, and they were almost definitely conscious of reentering their own way of living as though one entered an enclosure.
He admired anew the fireplace, with its smokelessness, its draft that set the flame quickly blazing, the heat thrown out from its shallow back. She prepared food while he tended to the ponies. The house became warm, but the air was sweet, the adobe walls and clay floor were clean, and now, with lively appetites, they smelt the good food cooking. She sat back from the fire while things stewed and bubbled. Kneeling beside her, he kissed her—to him perhaps more than anything else the act symbolic of their life apart—and they smiled at each other with grave pleasure. For a minute she was limp in his arms, then she pushed him away with an affectionate, scolding word and returned to a pot that was boiling over. He lay back on the sheepskins, watching. Domesticity, his wife, his home, perfection.
The loom-frame hung near the door; on the other side was the anvil. The place was permeated with an excited happiness, fullness, completion. Had any religious-minded Navajo, sensitive enough to the reiterated doctrine of hozoji to feel it without words, entered that place, he would have felt that he had, indeed, entered the “house of happiness.”
XV
I
The winter passed as swiftly as the summer; more so, in fact, for, feeling more sure of herself, Slim Girl consented to a social life. They went to various dances, becoming better known among the Southern Navajos, who began to accept her as entirely one of themselves. Learning with practice better and better how to avoid being different in a way that troubled others, she was able to be one of them without the fatal appearance of reserve and effort. By a slow process, she saw, Laughing Boy really was bringing her back into her own people. She consented out of policy to undergo the Night Chant initiation, the scourging with yucca leaves, the demonstration of the masks, and having done so found, surprised at her own naivete, that it was a genuine source of satisfaction to her. Knowing that something of the true substance was forever lost to her, she surrounded herself as much as possible with the trappings of Navajo-ism.
There were obstacles and interruptions: a double life carries heavy enough penalties, and a past is a past, particularly if its locale is much the same as that of the present. Red Man, the wrestler of Tsé Lani, sophisticated and self-willed, was present at many of those dances. Slim Girl had never given him more than hope, and even that, he felt, more because he served a purpose than for anything else. She had used him. Now she belonged to this rustic, who had humiliated him, and who obviously did not know what it was all about. Red Man was too good an Indian to bear much resentment for the wrestling defeat, but it served the purpose of preventing him from amusing himself by explaining to Laughing Boy just what he knew about his wife. Besides, he shrewdly suspected, such a recital would be dangerous in the extreme.
So he adopted an attitude of smiling implications, of “I could and I would,” that was as effective as possible for making trouble. Laughing Boy remembered the dancing at Tsé Lani, and he felt disturbed. Watching Red Man, it came upon him that, remarkable though his wife was, she was subject to the same general laws as other people, and he was fairly sure that he was not the first man she had known in love. Many things suddenly aligned themselves in a new way to assume a monstrous form. He became very quiet, and thought hard.
Slim Girl saw it immediately, not knowing what he was thinking, but feeling the reality of her peril. At that dance,
