“But listen. There are two kinds of men. There are men with the second strength, and men without it.
“When the first gringos came, we lost our second strength. And the padres taught us: Submit! Submit!
“The gringos had got the second strength!
“How?
“Like cunning ones, they stole it on the sly. They kept very still, like a tarantula in his hole. Then when neither sun nor moon nor stars knew he was there, Biff!—the tarantula sprang across, and bit, and left the poison and sucked the secret.
“So they got the secrets of the air and the water, and they got the secrets out of the earth. So the metals were theirs, and they made guns and machines and ships, and they made trains and telegrams and radio.
“Why? Why did they make all these things? How could they do it?
“Because, by cunning, they had got the secret of the second strength, which comes from behind the sun.
“And we had to be slaves, because we had only got the first strength, we had lost the second strength.
“Now we are getting it back. We have found our way again to the secret sun behind the sun. There sat Quetzalcoatl, and at last Don Ramón found him. There sits the red Huitzilopochtli, and I have found him. For I have found the second strength.