“Surely, such are precious to the Trues! For she is as the Evening Star, good to see!” and Pablo craned forward eagerly. “The viejo will be a Shaman,” he added, mentally, “for so our own Fathers make the lightning come at the medicine dance.[34] But she! If there were such in Shee-eh-huíb-bak, then one might take a wife—for her face is no face of a witch!”
Just then there came another flash; and then a soft, girlish cry. The magic lightning of the conjurer had betrayed Pablo; and before he could spring away a heavy hand was upon his shoulder.
“Hi-ma-tu-kú-eh?” demanded a deep voice in an unknown tongue.
“Nah Tee-wah,” said the abashed hunter, trying in vain to shake off that strong grasp.
“Tee-wah?” said the stranger, speaking in Pablo’s own language. “I, too, have the tongue of Shee-eh-huíb-bak, for my wife was of there. But now she has gone to Shee-p’ah-poón, and there lives for me only my child, and she is hurt. But what hast thou here, peeping at our medicine?”
“It is by chance, Kah-báy-deh,” answered Pablo. “For yesterday when the sun was so, I wounded a deer, and unto here I have followed it in vain. For, perhaps, it has the Power, and I could not kill it. And when I heard thy song I came, not knowing what it was.”
“Since yesterday when the sun was so, thou hast followed the road of a wounded deer? And how wounded?”
“In truth, I gave it two arrows through the life, but it minded them not.”
“Come, then, and thou shalt see thy hunting,” and he drew Pablo into the temple. In a moment a dry arm of the entraña (which the Trues gave for the first candles) was burning; and by its smoky, flaring light Pablo could see his strange surroundings. Beside him, that breakless hand still on his shoulder, stood an aged Indian. His hair was white as the snows of Shoo-p’ah-toó-eh, and his undimmed eyes shone from deep under snowy brows. He was naked but for the breech-clout, and upon his left arm was a great gauntlet from the forepaw of Ku-aí-deh, the bear, with all its claws. But at his wrinkled face Pablo stared in affright, for all across it ran long, savage knife-stripes, so old that they, too, were cut with wrinkles. “Rayado!” flashed through the young hunter’s mind, “even as were They-of-the-Old who dwelt in the mesa of the Hoo-máh-no! But they are all dead since long ago.”