Page:Spider Boy (1928).pdf/184

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take in their mouths they send their yearly message back to Mother Earth. In the spring, at the Taos Pueblo, no wheel is permitted to roll over the ground. It is believed that a rolling wheel would crush the pregnant Mother's offspring.

More and more Ambrose fell under the spell of the soft voice of the Little Mother of the Indian as she detailed further peculiarities of the noble redskin. When she described his manifold sufferings at the hands of white politicians, Ambrose was almost ready to weep in sympathy. Bereft of his land whenever oil or any other valuable commodity was discovered on it, tossed at some senator's whim from a fertile valley where his ancestors had ploughed for generations into an arid desert, in face of all adversity he maintained a stoic indifference. At the end of this discourse Ambrose received with enthusiasm Marna Frost's apparently impersonal but none the less warm proposal that they should all go together on the morrow to visit the Pueblo at Santo Domingo.

Ambrose's initial experience with the Indian was disillusioning. These particular Indians did not appear to be very clean, either in their personal appearance or in their households. The pieces of rotting flesh, strung on lines too low for passing heads to