“Beautiful!” said Aunt Maria.  “That court is absolutely swept and dusted.  One might give a ball there.  I should like to hear Lucretia Mott speak in it.”

Her reflections were interrupted by the courteous gestures of a middle-aged, dignified Moqui, who was apparently inviting the party to enter one of the dwellings.

Pepita and the other two Indian women, with the wounded muleteers, were taken to another house.  Aunt Maria, Clara, Thurstane, and Phineas Glover entered the residence of the chief, and found themselves in a room six or seven feet high, fifteen feet in length and ten in breadth.  The floor was solid, polished clay; the walls were built of the large, sunbaked bricks called adobes; the ceilings were of beams, covered by short sticks, with adobes over all.  Skins, bows and arrows, quivers, antlers, blankets, articles of clothing, and various simple ornaments hung on pegs driven into the walls or lay packed upon shelves.

“They are a musical race, I see,” observed Aunt Maria, pointing to a pair of painted drumsticks tipped with gay feathers, and a reed wind-instrument with a bell-shaped mouth like a clarionet.  “Of course they are.  The Welsh were always famous for their bards and their harpers.  Does anybody in our party speak Welsh?  What a pity we are such ignoramuses!  We might have an interesting conversation with these people.  I should so like to hear their traditions about the voyage across the Atlantic and the old mill at Newport.”

Her remarks were interrupted by a short speech from the chief, whom she at first understood as relating the adventures of his ancestors, but who finally made it clear that he was asking them to take seats.  After they were arranged on a row of skins spread along the wall, a shy, meek, and pretty Moqui woman passed around a vase of water for drinking and a tray which contained something not unlike a bundle of blue wrapping paper.

“Is this to wipe our hands on?” inquired Aunt Maria, bringing her spectacles to bear on the contents of the tray.

“It smells like corn bread,” said Clara.

So it was.  The corn of the Moquis is blue, and grinding does not destroy the color.  The meal is stirred into a thin gruel and cooked by pouring over smooth, flat, heated stones, the light shining tissues being rapidly taken off and folded, and subsequently made up in bundles.

The party made a fair meal off the blue wrapping paper.  Then the meek-eyed woman reappeared, removed the dishes, returned once more, and looked fixedly at Thurstane’s bloody sleeve.

“Certainly!” said Aunt Maria.  “Let her dress your arm.  I have no doubt that unpretending woman knows more about surgery than all the men doctors in New York city.  Let her dress it.”

Thurstane partially threw off his coat and rolled up his shirt sleeve.  Clara gave one glance at the huge white arm with the small crimson hole in it, and turned away with a thrill which was new to her.  The Moqui woman washed the wound, applied a dressing which looked like chewed leaves, and put on a light bandage.