“Are they children of the moon or the sun, or the stars that they are white?” he demanded.
“It may be so,” she said very lowly, conscious that his gloomy eyes were trying to make her see what he felt, but she must not see, and she spoke with averted head.
Then he rose and stood erect and stretched out his arms their widest and surveyed himself with measuring gaze and a certain pride, but the other thought came back with its gloom and he laughed shortly with disdain of himself.
“I have felt stronger than all the boys–always! Do you know why that has been? I know now why–it was because I stood alone,–I was the only child of the light and I dreamed things of that. Now a man tells us there are many such people, and their magic is great, and my strength goes because of the many!”
His mother stroked his hand reassuringly. “Na-vin (my own),” she said steadily. “I have felt your dreams, and I also dream them. Fear no one born of the light or of the darkness, and when you are a man you will have all your strength–and more than your own strength.”
“You say that, my mother?”
She held her head erect now and looked straight and steadily into the eyes of her son.
“I say it!”
And he remembered that it was more than his mother who spoke, it was the Medicine Woman of the Twilight and of the strange places, and the far off thoughts.
He lifted her hand and breathed on it. “I am again Tahn-té,” he said, and smiled. “You make me find myself!”
CHAPTER IV
WHITE SEEKERS OF TREASURE
When Alvarado marched his band of adventurers into the pueblo Ua-lano to the sound of tom-toms and flutes of welcome, an Indian woman with a slender boy stood by the gate and watched the welcome of the strangers.
An exceedingly reckless, rakish lot they were–this flower of the Mexican forces who the Viceroy was only too willing should explore all lands, and seas, so they kept themselves away from the capitol.
The women and the children shrank back as the horses clattered in. Some laughed to cover their fear, others threw prayer meal, and their fright made the commander notice the blanketed figure of the woman whose eyes alone shone above the draperies held close, and who stared so keenly into each white face as they passed.
“Who is the dame in the mask of the blanket?” he asked of his host Chief Bigotes–the courteous barbarian who had crossed seventy leagues of the desert to ask that his village be honored by the god-like ones from the south.
Bigotes looked at her, did not know, but after inquiring came back and spoke.
“It is a strange thing but it is true,” said the interpreter, “she is called the One from the Twilight Land. She went as a girl from Te-hua to Ah-ko for study with the medicine people of one order there. One night it was as if she go into the earth, or up in the sky. No one ever see her any more. It was the year of the fire of the star across the sky. Now she comes from the west and so great a medicine woman is she that leading men are sent to guard her on the trail to the Te-hua people–and to guard her son.”
“Faith! Your strangers are a handsome pair. The boy would make a fine page in a civilized land. He is the fairest Indian I’ve seen.”
The boy knew that his mother and himself were objects of query, and stood stolid, erect and disdainful,–the stranger should see that all their clanking iron, their dominating swagger, and their trained animals could not make him move an eyelash of wonder.
But to his mother he said:
“They have much that we will need if we ever fight them; their clanking clothes and shields can break many arrows.”
“Why do you talk of fighting?”
“I do not know why. It is all I thought of as I looked at them.”
One thing interested him more than all else, and that was a man in a grey robe who carried a book, and turned the pages in absorbed meditation; sometimes his reading was half aloud, and Tahn-té slipped near each time he could, for to him it looked as if the man talked to the strange white paper.–He thought it must be some sort of high magic, and of all he saw in the new comers, he coveted most of the contents of those pages,–it was more wonderful than the clanging metal of their equipment.
A tiny elf-like girl followed Tahn-té as a lost puppy would, until he asked her name, and was told it was Yahn–that she lived in Povi-whah by the big river and that her mother was visiting some society of which she was a member,–that she was in the kiva and could not be seen for four days and nights, and in the coming of the beasts and the strangers, her caretaker had lost her, and the home where she had stayed last night she did not know.
She knew only she was lost, and some boys had told her that the new kind of beasts ate little girls. She did not weep or call, but she tried to keep her little nude body out of sight behind Tahn-té if a horse or a mule turned its head in the direction she was.
So glad she was to be protected that she told him all her woes in the strange town. The greatest was that a dog had taken from her hand the roasted ear of corn she had been eating, and she wished Ka-yemo was there, he would have maybe killed the dog.
Inquiry disclosed the fact that Ka-yemo was not her brother; he lived in Provi-whah. Her own name was Yahn. No:–it was not a Te-hua name. It was Apache, for her mother was Apache–and the Te-hua men had caught her when they were hunting, and always her mother had told Yahn to stay close to the houses, for hunting enemies might bear her away into slavery–and Yahn was not certain but these men on the beasts might be hunters.
She was very tiny, and she spoke imperfectly, but shyness was not a part of her small personality, and she insisted on making herself understood. To Tahn-té she seemed like a boy rather than a girl, and he called her Pa-ah-dé which is the Te-hna word for “brother”–and later he gave her to his mother to keep her out of the way of the horses and the strange men.
And thus it was that Tahn-té, and Apache Yahn saw together the strange visitors from the south, and Yahn, though but a baby, thought they might be hunters whom it would be as well to hide from, and Tahn-té 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-té.”
To the man from whom the rakish Spanish soldiers bent the knee and removed the covering from the head, Tahn-té 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