"Is this land beyond the sunset?" I inquired sarcastically.
"It must be!" His voice rang with conviction. "Did we not see the sun set behind the Sky Mountains? And we crossed the Sky Mountains—and this land must be still beyond the Sky Mountains."
"Ay, but Tawannears, you know that this is but a tale——"
"Yes, a tale of my people," he agreed steadily. "If one warrior did it, why could not Tawannears? So I believed always. Now I know it to be so. I have done it. Here we sit in the valley of Lost Souls. There is Ataentsic, brother."
He pointed to fat old Angwusi, who was eying us as balefully as Kokyan and the snake priests, at last oblivious to the untiring grace with which Kachina still danced before Massi's wooden grimace.
"And there is Jouskeha, her grandson." He singled out Wiki. "As the tale told, when the warrior came to the valley his Lost Soul was dancing with other souls before those two, and Jouskeha, in pity for him, took his Lost Soul and placed her in a pumpkin, and he carried the pumpkin back to his own country.
"See it is all here. There is the pumpkin. There are the Lost Souls, who also danced. Ataentsic, I think, is loath to give up my Lost Soul, but Jouskeha's face is only sad. It is all as the tale said it would be. All that remains, brother, is to replace the Lost Soul in the pumpkin, and carry her back to my village."
Argument with him was impossible. He believed implicitly in this chain of inexplicable coincidences. He, who was in so many ways as cultured as an English gentleman, was the complete savage in this matter, resting his confidence in the vague mythology of his people, accepting for truth a familiar likeness and a sequence of parallel incidents.
I turned to Peter with a gesture of despair.
"What can we do?" I asked.