t sort of animal wore such a skin, though he
knew at first sight that it must be a very large one. Finally the old
medicine man with whom he was talking began to make sketches on the
inside of one of the great robes. The Spaniard in his turn made
sketches, drawing a horse, a goat, a bear, a wolf, a bull. When he drew
the bull the old Indian got excited. He declared that that was very like
the animal they hunted, but that their bulls had great humped shoulders
like this--he added a high curved line over the back. Cabeca came to the
conclusion that it must be some sort of hunchbacked cow, but whatever it
was, the curly furry hide was comforting on cold nights. The old Indian
told him a few days after that some of the young men had just come in
with news of a herd of these great animals moving along one of their
trails, and if the white men cared to travel with them he could see them
for himself.

It did not take the trader long to make up his mind. He went with the
Indians at the slow trot which covers so many miles in a day, and sooner
than they had expected, they saw from a little rise in the ground a vast
herd of slowly moving animals which at first the white man took for
black cattle. But they were not cattle.

There was the huge hump with the curly mane, and there were the short
horns and slender, neat little legs which had seemed so out of
proportion in the old Indian's sketch. From their point of view they
could see the hunters cut out one animal and attack him with their
arrows and lances without arousing the fears of the rest. The creatures
moved quietly along, grazing and pawing now and then, darkening the
plain almost as far as the eye could see. The trader spent several days
with the tribe, and when he went south again he had a bundle of hides so
large that he had to drag it on a kind of hurdle made of poles. He had
helped the Indians decorate some of the hides they had, and whenever he
did this he wrote his own name, the date, and a few words, somewhere on
the skin.

[Illustration: "THE CREATURES DARKENED THE PLAIN ALMOST AS FAR AS EYE
COULD SEE."--_Page_ 191]

"Why do you do this?" asked the medicine man, putting one long bronze
finger on the strange marks.

"It is a message," said Cabeca de Vaca. "If any of my own people see it
they will know who made the pictures."

The Indian looked at him thoughtfully.

"You are very clever," he said. "You ought to be a medicine-man."

This put another idea int