III
She was beset by difficulties and entanglements, but she was conquering them one by one, even turning them to her use, as though she were taking weapons from her enemies. She could shape and bend men, she could control her destinies in theirs. In her thoughts, she tasted in advance the happiness of the goal towards which she aimed, and she felt her power, power, power; and so, as far as she could tell, she was happy.
Her weaving was winning Laughing Boy’s unstinted praise, and, to her surprise and great satisfaction, becoming a source of income. The trading post in Los Palos would pass on to her occasional orders from tourists or people in the East. If she had been willing to weave the entirely un-Indian pictures of actual objects that so many tourists demand, she could have had all the work she could handle at fancy prices; but she refused to do anything, or use any colours not purely Navajo, and she strengthened her husband in his natural reluctance to stamp shapeless strings of swastikas, thunderbirds, and other curiosities on his silver. She was precious about it, as she was about all Navajo things. It was one piece with her eagerness to speak familiarly of everything familiar to them, to participate in every phase of their life, to acquire completely the Navajo gesture. When they were rich and lived in the North, she thought, she would make herself an influence for preserving all native ways; she would use any power they acquired in combating Christianity, short hair, shoes, ready-made trousers, and the creeping in of American-derived words. Already she had amused her husband by insisting on calling coffee by its old, cumbrous name of little-split-round-ones, instead of the much easier coghwé, that had been taken into the language.
Laughing Boy’s reputation was spreading. The Harvey agent had made her a tentative offer for them to come to Grand Canyon. In the beginning of spring, at planting time, they moved forge and loom outdoors again. At sunset, laying aside tools, or coming in, tired and at peace, from working in the soft earth, they sang together.
Now was the time when ponies began to grow fat, and the desert was all one mass of flowers. Remembering a good thing from her school days, Slim Girl brought in great bunches, Indian paint brush, fireweed, cactus blooms, and a hundred others, and stuck them in tin cans about the house. This puzzled Laughing Boy at first, but later he caught on, and enjoyed grouping them, with a good feeling for arrangements of masses of colour, but little interest in the blossoms as such.
There was movement in the desert. Horse-trading picked up again. The first sprouts of corn came through the ground, the peach trees began to put out leaves; one of them triumphantly produced a blossom. The days slipped by. Life was settled, serene, monotonous; there was no detail of it that one would wish to change.