ed upon false premises and consequently led
to illogical conclusions. I am afraid that I showed a little temper on
this occasion; for Fray Antonio manifested a persistence in his defence
of what I regarded as his wholly untenable position that amounted to
what I held to be downright pig-headedness. And so, for a considerable
length of time, we stood there, among the bodies of the dead Indians,
and first one of us and then the other handled the sword, and expressed
with increasing warmth our views respecting it and each other; and we
might have stood there much longer had not Young--with the best of
intentions, no doubt, but in a way the certainly was not
agreeable--taken upon himself to bring our controversy for the time
being to an end.

"I don't exactly know what you and the Padre are jawing about at such a
rate, Professor," he struck in; "but as well as I can catch on, it's
about things which happened three or four hundred years ago. I don't
want to interrupt you, of course; but I do want the Padre--he knows
something about surgery, as I saw the other day when he took that cactus
thorn out of Pablo--to do something to plug up this hole in my leg. It's
bleeding a good deal, and it hurts like the very devil. And I guess
Rayburn'd be glad to have that slit in his forehead tied up too."

To do Fray Antonio justice, he took this interruption in better part
than I did; for I was deeply interested in the argument in which we were
engaged, and wished to continue it. But when I explained what Young
wanted, he turned to him at once, and very tenderly as well as very
skilfully dressed his wound; and then bandaged the gash in Rayburn's
forehead, and the cut in Pablo's cheek. Pablo decidedly objected to this
bandaging, for it put a peremptory stop for a while to his playing on
his mouth-organ. For me no surgery was required. Fray Antonio carefully
felt my shoulder while he moved my arm--thereby hurting me most
horribly--and as the result of his investigations he assured me that the
bones were neither broken nor out of place.

Rayburn also examined the maccuahuitl with much interest. "Of course it
is not brass," he said, "and of course it cannot possibly be
phosphor-bronze. But, if such a thing were a metallurgical possibility,
I should say that it was gold--treated in some manner that gives it as
great a hardness as bronze receives when treated with phosphorus, but
with some chemical change wrought in its constitution that give