By this time they had reached the top of the bluff, and were now close to the houses, on whose curious domed roofs many people were sitting,--women busy with their work, young men wrapped in their robes, and looking off into the distance, and little girls playing with their dolls or their puppies. The ground in the village all about the houses was worn bare by the passage of many feet; Indians were going to and fro, women carrying water and wood, men naked, or wrapped in their summer sheets, little boys chasing each other, or, with their ropes trying to snare the dogs, which were usually too cunning for them.
Jack was greatly interested in the houses, and wished to look into one, and to this Hugh said there would be no objection. The entrance of each house was by a long passage-way, closed above, and at the sides, and passing through this, they found themselves at the door. Jack expected to go into a room that was dark; but this was not so. Above the center of the large room was a wide open space, which answered both for chimney and for window. About the fireplace, which was under the smoke hole, at the corners of a square, stood four stout posts, reaching up to and supporting the rafters of the roof. The floor of the house was swept clean, and all around the walls were raised platforms, serving for beds, and separated by screens of straight willow sticks strung on sinew, from the adjacent bed on either side. In front of some of the beds similar screens hung down like curtains so that the bed could be cut off from the observation of those in the house. Over the fireplace hung a pot, and two pleasant-faced women were sitting near it, sewing moccasins. They looked up pleasantly, as the strangers stood in the doorway, and Hugh spoke a few words to them, to which they made some answer. Then the strangers withdrew.
Keeping on through the village, they walked out on the higher prairie, toward the tribal burying-ground, but not such a burying-ground as Jack was accustomed to see. Here were placed the dead, wrapped up in bundles, on platforms raised on four poles, eight or ten feet above the ground. Evidently no attention was paid to them after burial, for many of the poles which supported the platforms had rotted and fallen down, and, in the older part of the graveyard the ground was strewn with pieces of old robes and clothing, and with white bones.