he south, and Yahn, though but a baby, thought they
might be hunters whom it would be as well to hide from, and Tahn-te
thought much of the coats of mail, and how lances could be made to
pierce the joints.

He heard the name of the man with the black robe and the magic thing
of white leaves from which he talked--or which talked to him!--it was
"Padre"--there was also another name and it was "Luis." It meant the
same as "Father Ho-tiwa" or "Brother Tahn-te."

To the man from whom the rakish Spanish soldiers bent the knee and
removed the covering from the head, Tahn-te felt no antagonism as he
did for the men who carried the arquebus and swords. The man who is
called "Father" or the woman who is called "Mother" with the Indian
people, is a person to whom respect is due, and through Bigote he had
heard--by keeping quiet as a desert snake against a wall--that the man
of the grey robe who was called "Father" was the great medicine-man of
the white tribe. Through him the god of the white man spoke. In the
leaves of the white book were recorded this god's laws, and even these
white men who were half gods, and had conquered worlds beyond the big
water of the South, and of the East, bent their knees when the man of
the robe spoke of the sacred things.

Of these things he spoke to his mother, and was amazed to learn that
she knew of the white man's gods, and the white men's goddess. Never
had she talked to him of this, and she did not talk to him much now.
She only told him that all she knew would belong to him when the time
came, and that the time seemed coming fast--but it was not yet. When
he was older he could know.

When he talked to her of the many white pages in which the white god
had written, she told him that much wisdom--and strong magic must be
there. The white men had no doubt stolen for their earth-born god the
birth story of Po-se-yemo, the god of her own people. But his magic
had been great in that land across the seas and that people had
written words of the earth-born god as had certain tribes of Mexico,
and all that the god said and did had been written plainly as had been
written the records of Quetzel-coatle of the South, and it was not
good that their own tribe had not the written records of their gods.

"It may be that the time has come to make such records," said Tahn-te,
"our people should not be behind the other people."

"We have no written words,"--said his mother;--"our head men who
govern have