also knew that there was another less great one
called the Moon. And there were the stars. These also were spirits. They
sat about in the sky and generally had a good time. If you watched them
carefully against the tops of the lodge-poles, you could see that they
gradually did their sitting a little higher up, or a little lower down;
and sometimes, especially in the Mad Moon, they actually _ran_. To watch
a star run swiftly down a steep place in the sky and disappear, made
your heart jump. When the running stars which did not fall off into the
dark reached the prairie, they turned into the puff-balls the Indians
called "dusty-stars."

But a grandmother, it appeared, though neither a spirit nor a star, was
a Great Power to be reckoned with. There were days when she painted her
face bright yellow. These were solemn occasions. If you made a noise or
got in her way, she would wrinkle her skin till the paint cracked. If
you continued the annoyance, she would smack. As a painted curiosity
Dusty Star observed her with awe.

His first introduction to her was not on one of her painted days.
Without wanting to be rude he thought her face looked more like raw
buffalo hide than anything else he had yet met. Her hands also seemed of
that material, and did not feel pleasant when they felt his arms and
legs. Dusty Star objected to being mauled, even by a Great Power; but he
bore it as well as he could, because his mother told him to stand still;
only from that day onwards his grandmother's hands were the part of her
body he most thoroughly distrusted.

The second time he saw her was when she came to the tepee on her way to
take part in a medicine-bundle ceremony. She was very grandly dressed in
a beaded buckskin robe, and her face was thickly coated with the famous
yellow paint. Dusty Star was squatting with Kiopo at the back of the
tepee, watching his mother making pemmican, when this yellow vision
peered in upon them through the opening. He stared at it with
astonishment. He was not afraid, but it made him feel uncomfortable. It
was as if his grandmother's face, like the maple leaves, had gone yellow
with the Fall. And from the middle of the yellow, her sunken eyes glared
blackly in the hollows of her head.

Kiopo also disapproved of the vision. That was very plain by the way his
hair bristled along his back, and his upper lip curled back to show his
fangs while he snarled.

The yellow face of Sitting-Always scowled between th