Free Zia by Scott O’Dell Page A

little to each other.
    Anita danced a bamba, which is difficult, with a tumbler of water on her head, while with her feet she picked up from the floor a handkerchief with two corners tied together.
    Then Rosa danced a jarabe with Stone Hands, while singers stood in a circle and broke in with short verses. She held her skirts above her ankles to show off her feet, which were tiny, and the rest of us drummed with our heels.
    One of the boys had gotten a dozen duck eggs from somewhere, emptied and then filled them with perfume water that he got from Rosa. He pelted all the girls he liked with the perfumed eggs, which made them shriek and chase him through the courtyard.
    Again Stone Hands and I were dancing together, saying nothing to each other.
    Then he said, "I have asked you where you came from. I have asked many times and each time you give me a different answer."

    "I am a Digger Indian," I said. The Diggers were the lowliest tribe anywhere on the coast. They lived near San Diego and got their names from the gringos because they spent most of their time digging roots out of the ground.
    "Someday you will tell me the truth." He smiled and his thin mustache twinkled, but he was angry. "Someday before long, before I die, perhaps."
    "I will tell you now so you will not have to die waiting. My mother came from the Island of the Blue Dolphins. As you already know, she was the sister of Karana who is the girl who still lives on the island and has been there since before I was born. Our tribe when the ship brought them to Santa Barbara did not like it here and they left. You know this also."
    "There are many that think the same," Stone Hands said. "At every Mission from San Diego to San Francisco, they think the same."
    "I do not know where any of them went except my mother," I said as we danced slowly around and around. "My mother married an Indian from Mission Ventura and went to live at Pala which is a village south of here many leagues."
    "I know Pala," Stone Hands said. "The Cupeños owned a wonderful country of streams and plumes of steam that came out of the ground and thousands of acres of grazing land and many cattle and horses. You know what happened then? A gringo came and married a young lady who was brought up by the governor's mother."

    I knew this story and it always made me mad to hear it. It still makes me mad.
    "Warner, the gringo, got his wife to talk to the governor's mother, who talked to the governor himself, and then within the time of two moons the land of the Cupeños, which they had owned for hundreds of years, was given to Warner. A gift of fifteen square miles of the best land in California was made to a gringo. Just as though you were passing out a plate of beans, he received fifteen thousand acres. You know what happened to the Cupeños?"
    "I remember."
    "They were moved away, many miles away, to a place that even the coyotes shunned."
    "That was where my mother lived and where I was born and where my mother died of a disease the gringos brought," I said.
    "You know what I talk about therefore."
    "Yes," I said, "I know it well."
    Never again would Stone Hands have to ask me where I was born when he could not think of anything else to say. I would have told him before if all of this had not been so bitter to think about and to say.

Chapter 16
    W HEN THE fiesta was over and everyone went to bed I waited until the bell in the big tower struck. This was the signal I had waited for.

    I slipped out of bed and found the iron key that Stone Hands had made. The other girls—there were fifty-nine of us—were out of bed now and were fixing their blankets into tight rolls.
    I went to the door that led outside to the hallway and downstairs into the garden. I put the key into the keyhole. I was fearful that it would not fit, that it would go into the keyhole but not turn the lock. I worked quietly and carefully.
    The door made a squeak, as it always did, but it came open. In their bare feet, clutching their