When he issued from the cave where both his uncle and he had found shelter, the storm was over, and nature had assumed a different aspect.  A heavy shower in the mountains of New Mexico is often followed by illuminations of peculiar beauty.  So it happened then.  The west, where the sun had already descended behind the mountains, was crossed by a series of arches displaying successively from below upward the most resplendent gold, bright orange, green, and finally deep blue colours.  In the eastern skies the storm-king hovered still in a mass of inky clouds above the horizon, but these clouds had receded beyond the graceful cone of the Tetilla, which stood out in front of the dark mass of the storm sharply defined, with a rosy hue cast over every detail of its slopes.  The air was of wonderful transparency, and every tint of the brilliant heavens above and in the west seemed to reproduce itself with increased intensity, on the dark, cloudy bank in the east, in the dazzling arch of a magnificent rainbow.  The rays of the setting sun no longer penetrated the depths of the vale, they only grazed the moisture-dripping tops of the tallest pines, changing them into pyramids of sparkling light.

Okoya looked at the scenery before him, but its beauty was not what caused him to gaze and to smile.  The Indian is quite indifferent to the sights of nature, except from the standpoint of strictest and plainest utilitarianism.  The rainbow fascinated the boy, not through its brilliancy and the perfection of the arch, but because the rainbow was in his conception Shiuana, and a messenger from Those Above.[10] Where the ends of the luminous arch appear to rest, a message from heaven is said to be deposited.  No more favourable token could have greeted him, for although the message was not for him, since the brilliant bow seemed to stand far off from the Rito, still the Shiuana, the spirits, graced the sky with their presence.  They appeared clad in the brightest hues, and what is bright and handsome is to the Indian a harbinger of good.

No wonder, therefore, that the boy greeted his mother with a happy face and a pleasant smile.  He had passed Shotaye in the entrance, and his salutation to her was widely different from the gruff notice he had taken of her in the morning.  When, afterward, he met his mother’s gaze and saw how kindly she looked at him, how warm her invitation to come in sounded, his heart bounded with delight, and he obeyed her summons with a deep sigh of relief.  His appearance was not very prepossessing, for between the caves and the big house a number of newly created mud-puddles and rivulets had crossed his path.  His scanty clothing was profusely bespattered, and broad cakes of mud clung to the soles of his naked feet.  Before entering the house he carelessly shook off and scraped away the heaviest flakes, and then went in and sat down on the bundle of skins.  Say Koitza offered him no change of clothing; she did not bring a pair of slippers, warm and dry, for his wet feet.  No, she simply went into the kitchen and let him alone.  Such is the Indian custom.  But in the kitchen she began to move about.  She was cooking, and that proved beyond a doubt that everything must be right again.  After a while she squatted in the inner doorway and inquired,—­