If there was any one thing in the wide world I wanted to do more than another, it was to visit the New Mexican pueblo where my friend Tenatsali[7] spent so many years of his strange career. He had discovered it and made it his own and before his death he turned over to me his title to its romance and mystery. This was all he possessed in it, for even the stone house he built with money earned by literary work had dropped from his lavish hands. It happened one winter while crossing the continent I heard there was to be a dance at the pueblo. The news decided me. I stopped off on the railroad, hired a team from the sheriff and had him drive me down to the town. It was winter; snow covered the heights and we were both chilled through when we reached Tenatsali’s big stone house, then a trading store. The farmer-agent, a jovial man, who had been the trader in Tenatsali’s day, lived in the other end of the building. He welcomed me as an old friend and told me stories of Tenatsali until late into the night, as we sat before his fire. It was in his house Tenatsali had remained concealed in the long interval from the time he rode out so debonairly on the war-path to take a scalp, and the arrival of a scalp from Washington. He was obliged to perform a scalp-taking feat before he could be admitted to membership among the Priests of the Bow. As he would not secure a scalp in the orthodox way, he had to get one as best he could. It was a very old scalp, one from the National Museum collected by Lewis H. Morgan many years before.
I slept soundly after the long ride, but, rising betimes, sought a guide that I might go to the village, which is like an ant hill, across the little river, and then climb to the summit of that mesa to the East which overlooks the great valley. The two possible interpreters, youths who had been reared by the trader, were both sequestered in the village as they were to take part in the dance. And so it was decided I could do no better than engage a schoolboy who, while he spoke little or no English, could at least show me the trail up the 176 mesa. In spite of the snow the boy was barefoot, and his single garment was scanty protection from the cold. We crossed the wide stretch of plain, rounded the mesa and took the steep trail on the farther side. It was half obliterated by the snowdrifts, but the boy ran lightly ahead, up and up, stretching me a hand at the steep places until we reached the broad, table top. There in an open shrine stood the image of the war god, Ahaiyuta, his plumes bedraggled and blown about by the wind. We passed the ruins covered with spiny cactus and I waited while the boy, nimble as a goat, descended the trail beside the pinnacled rock to visit the old images of the war gods ranged in a row in their immemorial cave. There too he saw, I suppose, the painted jars that held the old masks of Sayatasha. When he came back we visited the other war-god shrine and descended the mesa to return across the plain to the store, tired and hungry after our seven-miles’ round.
Here we found people from far and near who had come to see the dance. There was Jesus, the Mexican, and French Dan, Falstaffian and dissolute. There was the Missionary whom later I was to know better and the Field Matron, a wraith of a woman who went silently among the Indians and gave them some drug she had discovered through an advertisement in the “boiler plate” of her home paper. There were the Indians who fraternize with the whites, like the Albino and the old Mormon, or to give him his full name, Ten Cent Mormon, beca............