The Delight Makers | Page 7

silent, as if he had not heard the query.
"What have you heard, boy?" continued the other.
Shyuote shrugged his shoulders. He had no inclination to reply.
"Why don't you answer?" Okoya persisted.
His brother looked up, cast a furtive glance at the interlocutor, then stared vacantly, but with head erect, before him. His eyes were glassy and without any expression.
[Illustration: The east end of the Ca?on of the Tyuonyi]
Whenever the Indian does not wish to speak on any subject, whatever it be, no power on earth can compel him to break silence. Okoya, as an Indian, felt rather than understood this; and the child's refusal to answer a very simple question aroused his suspicions. He looked at the stubborn boy for a moment, undecided whether he would not resort to force. The child's taunts had mortified his pride in the first place; now that child's reticence bred misgivings. He nevertheless restrained both anger and curiosity for the present, not because of indifference but for policy's sake, and turned to go. Shyuote looked for a moment as if he wished to confess to his brother all that the latter inquired about, but soon pouted, shrugged his shoulders, and set out after Okoya in a lively fox-trot again.
The valley lay before them; they had reached the end of the grove.
Smiling in the warm glow of a June day, with a sky of deepest azure, the vale of the Rito expanded between the spot which the boys had reached and the rocky gateways in the west, where that valley seemed to begin. Fields, small and covered with young, bushy maize-plants, skirted the brook, whose silvery thread was seen here and there as its meanderings carried it beneath the shadow of shrubs and trees, or exposed it to the full light of the dazzling sun. In the plantations human forms appeared, now erect, now bent down over their work. A ditch of medium size bordered the fields on the north, carrying water from the brook for purposes of irrigation. Still north of the ditch, and between it and the cliffs, arose a tall building, which from a distance looked like a high clumsy pile of clay or reddish earth.
This pile was irregularly terraced. Human beings stood on the terraces or moved along them. Now and then one was seen to rise from the interior of the pile to one of the terraced roofs, or another slowly sank from sight, as if descending into the interior of the earthy heap. On the outside, beams leaned against it, and on them people went up and down, as if climbing ladders. Thin films of smoke quivered in the air from imperceptible flues.
The cliffs themselves extended north of this building and east and west as far as the range of view permitted, like a yellowish ribbon of towering height with innumerable flexures and alternations of light and shade. Their base was enlivened by the bustle of those who dwelt in caves all along the foot of the imposing rocky wall. Where to-day only vacant holes stare at the visitor, at the hour on the day when our story begins, human eyes peered through. Other doors were closed by deer-hides or robes. Sometimes a man, a woman, or a child, would creep out of one of these openings, and climbing upward, disappear in the entrance of an upper tier of cave-dwellings. Others would descend the slope from the cliffs to the fields, while still others returned from the banks of the ditch or of the brook. At the distance from which the boys viewed the landscape all passed noiselessly; no human voice, no clamour disturbed the stillness of the scene.
Peaceful as Nature appeared, neither of the youth were in the least struck by its charms or influenced by the spell which such a tranquil and cheerful landscape is likely to exercise upon thinking and feeling man. With both it was indifference; for the Indian views Nature with the eyes of a materially interested spectator only. But the elder brother had another reason for not noticing the beauty of the scene. He was not only troubled, he was seriously embarrassed. The hint thrown out by his little brother about the Koshare had struck him; for it led to the inference that the child had knowledge of secret arts and occult practices of which even he, Okoya, although on the verge of manhood, had never received any intimation. Far more yet than this knowledge, which Shyuote might have obtained through mere accident, the hint at unpleasant relations between Okoya and the Koshare startled the latter.
It was perfectly true that he not only disliked but even hated the cluster of men to which the name of Koshare was given in the tribe; but he had concealed his feelings as carefully as possible until now. Only