The lizard-body began to take form, as the artisan plied his blade without conscious endeavor.
He loved the girl madly! but she preferred another. Only bitterness and remorse, it seemed, could result from a further pressing of his claim. The wild appealed to his nature, and he half wished that he might leave the region now so rapidly being settled; leave and never know or hear of her living with the hated Easterner. Arizona flashed through his mind! His droning ceased, and the now completed gargoyle-lizard dropped from his hand. He wiped the cold perspiration from his forehead, as he muttered under his breath:
“I’m a goin’! I’m a goin’ never to show up ag’in in this dam’ country! For the best rider of the Flathead to be made a laughin’ brunt of by a feller who falls off a gentle cayuse! I’m a goin’ soon as I see he gets her for good.”
The Westerner rose unsteadily from his seat. He started, as he caught sight of the fantastic object at his feet. Its baleful eyes, its gaping, tusk-studded jaws and its reptile-like extremities, for a moment held his gaze. Recovering himself with a near-shudder, he ground the thing under his heel, with the single ejaculation:
“Shoyahpee!”
The dull thud of an axe broke on Jim’s ear. Turning, he discerned a commotion in the clump of willows at the river’s edge. He made his way through the thick brush and found Mary busy cutting the long, pliant stocks, some ten feet in length and not over an inch in diameter. She had several of them ready bundled, all neatly trimmed of branches. As he approached, he accosted her:
“Well, what you doin’? What you slashin’ the brush for? Clearin’ land a ready for you and Frenchy to homestead?”
A blush suffused the shy girl’s cheek. After a moment of embarrassment, she looked up:
“The poles are to build Stemteemä a sweat house. She wants to take a sweat today. It is trouble! and nothing will so ease her mind as to consult her sweat house, where she communes with the Great Spirit.”
“Some new trouble?”
“No! Cogewea. She is afraid—”
“Yes, I understand!” he interposed as the girl hesitated. “Let me have that knife! The axe is too heavy to cut this here small brush. Your han’s are too fine to be clearin’ woods. They’re made for some of them there music things that the Sisters play in Church.”
Surrendering the knife, Mary watched the foreman sever with a single stroke the slender growths. After a few moments, without a word she picked up some of the poles and started up the bank. Jim gathered the remaining armful and followed to a level plat only a few rods away, where the construction of the edifice was immediately begun. Everything must be according to the first guidance of the spirits in the long ago, otherwise something of a terrible nature might happen the votary.
Jim, assuming the more arduous part, deftly shaped a round, smooth pit about six inches in depth at a point in the ground floor where it would be just within and at the side of the low, arched entranceway. This he did while Mary gathered wood with which to heat the score of carefully selected stones to be later placed in the pit. With alternate layers of wood and stone, she soon had a roaring fire permeating the entire mass.
In the meantime, Jim had been busily engaged wattling the pliant poles into a cone-shaped net work, some four feet across and about three feet in height, with an arched opening of eighteen inches next the stone pit. The frame work was securely tied at the intersections with bark stripped from some of the poles. He covered the structure with bark from a fallen cottonwood among the river drift, exercising care that this roofing be entirely free of vents and crevices. Then procuring a shovel, he overspread the whole with four inches of dirt, packed firm by beating with his shovel blade.
The building was now complete even to the curtained doorway. Mary summoned the Stemteemä, whose eyes beamed, as she admiringly surveyed the shapely structure. Seating herself at the entrance, she sings a mystic spirit lay. Her snowy head sways in rhythm, as she waves toward the sun, now dipping low in the west. The dash of red paint across her forehead is in token of regard and high honor to the Spirit of the sweat house, which she is about to enter.
“Don’t you think them there rocks hot ’nough?” asked Jim of Mary.
“Maybe they are, although I have seen them hotter. The more hot they are the better Stemteemä likes it. She says that the sweat house favors the occupant with the good spirit, when its body is almost scorching—that is the body of the sweat house. Let her judge of the proper heat.”
Jim sat musing for some moments and then spoke:
“There are strange things ’bout this here sweat house business, and I have seen some of it when I was a little chap. My grandmother used to tell me the old tradition which says that the twelve sticks bent in the frame of the sweat house are the twelve ribs of the Spirit God, and that these here ribs can understand what you speak or sing to the gods. He’s a lover of songs—or of his own song—which some Injuns know and can sing. If you sweat and he is pleased with your visit, as a rule, he will bestow on you some favor. Should your petition fail the first time, then try again and if he’s still not humored and pleased, continue your appeal. I have known Injuns who would ‘sweat house’ for ten or more days in succession before accomplishin’ their wish. Whatever it might be, they always got it. This is why the older people believe so thoroughly in
