The Flute of the Gods

Little else was spoken of in the camp of the Castilians, but the witchcraft of the noble steed. The more pious picketed their own animals at a respectful distance from the one h...

Don Diego marvelled much at the briskness of the plans for a season of hunting ere his troublesome charge was well able to see out of both eyes. But on being told that the range...

Because a runner from Kat-yi-ti had been killed on the trail by a mountain lion, and because the village of Povi-whah had forgotten the strangers from the south in the excitemen...

It was the sentinel on the terrace who saw him, and he was at the ancient shrine at the mesa edge, and a flame was there to show that prayers were being made to greet the god of...

Ere the morning star saw its face in the sacred lake of the Na-im-be mountains, Tahn-té, the Po-Ahtun-ho, had done a thing not of custom:--he was leaving the governor to hear th...

When the runners carried the word to the river that the vision of Tahn-té had been a true vision, the padre and Don Diego stared at each other incredulous. It was a thing not to...

The one thing to which the boy gave awed attention was that when the time came for the villages to fight--a leader would be born to them--if the people of the valley were true t...

When Alvarado marched his band of adventurers into the pueblo Ua-lano to the sound of tom-toms and flutes of welcome, an Indian woman with a slender boy stood by the gate and wa...

When new things cast shadows across the Indian mind, every cloud touching the moon is watched at its birth and at its first hours of the circle, also the stars. And for those ot...

The morning stars were shining through the gray threatening sky, when a slender blanket draped figure stepped from Ysobel's doorway into the dusk, and came near putting foot on...

Indian prayer is not the placid acceptance of thoughts comforting. The complete man is both mind and body--and all of him must work when the gods are called upon for work, and b...

The journey of Tahn-té to his mother's land of the East was the wonder journey of the world! There were medicine-men of Ah-ko for their guides, and the people were many who went...

Of the many godly enterprises set afoot for exploration and conquest in New Spain of the sixteenth century, not all have chronicles important enough for the historian to make mu...

All the Castilians but Padre Vicente and Don Diego went with the warriors to the western heights. For reasons of his own, the padre preferred the pueblo when freed of the influe...

Vague tremblings were still felt underfoot; the river was red with the clay of fallen banks. Smoke came from an ancient crater to the south, and also the east, and above the Mes...

And while Yahn Tsyn-deh laid the trap, and the medicine drums sounded, and the women gathered the children close because of the trembling earth, one girl robed in the skin of a...

The stars had marked the middle of the night, and the Castilian camp slept, save for the guards who paced quietly through the pine groves, and the Te-hua sentinels on the summit...

The desert land of the Hopi people stretched yellow and brown and dead from mesa to mesa. The sage was the color of the dust, and the brazen sky was as a shield made hard and dr...

Even in the long after years in stately Christian Spain, Don Ruy was a silent man when his serene lady in stiff brocades and jewelled shoes would mock at court pageantry and sig...

When the moon had scarce reached the center of the sky, a gray faced man slipped through the corn fields of the river lands, and spoke to the Spanish sentry who paced before the...

The sentinels on the terrace who watched the night in Povi-whah knew these were nights when they did not watch alone. The Po-Ahtun-ho was abroad in the night for prayer, and whe...

"Brothers:--you of the life --Of also the fire divine! You of the mountains Of also the Mother Mist! Out of the mist is a voice. It is not the voice afraid! Out of the shadows,...

Mo-wa-thé,--the mother of Tahn-té, drew with her brush of yucca fibre the hair-like lines of black on the ceremonial bowl she was decorating. Tahn-té, slender, and nude, watched...

Summers of the Sun, and winters when the stars danced for the snow, had passed over the valley of Povi-whah. New people had been born into the world, and old people had died, bu...