The servant struck once with the hoe and took up the turnip, then, as commanded, she struck with her hoe again in the same place. Behold a hole! She leaned forward and looked down. She saw her home. She cried to her friend. “Look! I can see through the clouds. See! there is our home.”
The chief’s wife looked also, and she saw the village and her home. The girls sat looking through the hole, and they longed to go home, and they sat weeping. An old man chanced to pass by, and he saw them and stopped and asked:—
“What is the matter? What are you crying about?”
And they answered, “Because we can see our home. We are so far away, we wish to be there, but we can never get there.”
The old man passed on. He went to the chief and he told him that the girls sat weeping because they could see their home, and they wanted to go back to the earth.
The chief then called all his people together, and he sent them away to find all the lariats[5] that they could.
In the village, on the earth, every one had mourned for the chief’s daughters, who had so strangely disappeared, and could not be found. It was a long time since they were lost; but the people still thought of them.
To-day in the village a great many people had come to see the boys and young men play. They used a ring[6] and a long stick, round at one end. One person would throw the ring in the air and at the same time another would try to send his arrow through it; the men would run swiftly and throw their sticks when they were near the ring, for the one who got most arrows through while the ring was still in the air was the winner. All the people were excited over the game and urging on the young men, when one of them happened to look up toward the sky.
“Why, look up,” he called out, “something is coming down. Look! They are very large. Look at them!”
All who heard stopped and looked up, and others seeing them look, turned to see what it was. Many ran to the spot where these things were falling. Then the people found they were the lost girls.
The good chief in the dim star had ordered all the lariats knotted together and then he had wound them around the bodies of the two girls and dropped them gently through the hole in the sky to the earth, keeping tight the end of the rope until the girls reached the ground.