During the period of official mourning the loud wail was carried on incessantly, or at least at frequent intervals; fasting was practised; the women wept, sobbed, screamed, and yelled.  Both sexes gathered daily around the place where the effigy lay, praying loudly for the safe journey and arrival at Shipapu of the defunct.  The women alone shed tears on such occasions, the men only stared with a gloomy face and thoughtful mien.  They recalled and remembered the dead.  What the great master of historical composition has said of the ancient Germans may be applied here also:  “Feminis lugere honestum est, viris meminisse.”

In the humble abode where Topanashka Tihua had dwelt with his deaf old wife, and where his bloody remains had rested previous to being borne to the funeral pyre, his effigy lay covered by the handsomest piece of cotton cloth that could be found among the homes of the Rito, and a quaintly painted and decorated specimen of pottery contained the drinking-water for his soul.  It was dusky in the room, for the window as well as the hatchway afforded little light.  Subdued voices sounded from the apartment, monotonous recitals, which the loud refrain, “Heiti-na, Heiti-na,” at times interrupted.  The poor deaf widow sat with tearful eyes in a corner; her lips moved, but no sound came from them; only, when the leader of the choir broke out with appropriate gesticulations, she chimed in loudly.  When at such a signal the other women present began to tear their hair, she did the same, and shouted at the top of her voice like the others, “Heiti-na, Heiti-na!”

Group after group of mourners visited the room, until both clans, Tanyi and Tyame, had performed their duty.  Hannay, too, had made her appearance; she had shed tears like a rain-cloud, had howled and whined more than any one else.  Her grief was surely assumed, for when Tyope asked her in the evening she told him everything in detail that she had noticed,—­how this one had looked, how such and such a one had yelled,—­plainly showing that the flood of tears had in no manner impeded her faculties of perception, the sighs and sobs around her in no manner deafened her attentive ear.  Tyope listened with apparent indifference, and said nothing.  She attended to the weeping part, he not so much to the duty of pious recollection as to that of deep thinking over the new phase which matters had entered upon in consequence of the bloody event.

For this sudden death of the maseua was for his designs a most fortunate occurrence.  The only man who in the prospective strife between the clans might have taken an attitude dangerous, perhaps disastrous, to his purposes, was now dead; and the office which that man held had become vacant.  There was but one individual left in the tribe who might yet prove a stumbling-block to him; that was the Hishtanyi Chayan.  But the great medicine-man was not so much a man of action as a man of words, and the force of his oracular