"I pity you and shall not let you die," said the medicine spirit. "You shall see your home and friends."
Then the medicine spirit brought down a rain, to wash Konate's wounds and cool his fever. The medicine spirit sat with Konate most of the night, and told him many things: told him how to make a new kind of Sun-dance shield, and also an a-po-te, or sacred forked staff, that should be a medicine staff and have magic powers.
Toward morning the medicine spirit left, saying:
"Help is near."
Every bit of this Konate firmly insisted was true, although white men claimed that he dreamed. For, listen:
Meanwhile the Painted-red party were riding on, and in the Staked Plain they met six Comanches, bound to Mexico after plunder. They spoke to the Comanches regarding Konate, and asked them to cover his body so that the wolves should not get it.
This the Comanches promised to do, and continued to the Sun-mountain Spring where Konate had been left to die.
But when they reached the spring, they found Konate alive and stronger than when his comrades had bid him goodby! That astonished them. They then knew that he was "medicine." Therefore they washed him, and gave him food, and putting him on an extra horse they turned back and took him home.
The village, and all the tribe, also, were astonished to see him again. As proof that he had been visited by the medicine spirit, he made the medicine shield, of a new design, and the apote, or sacred forked stick. He took the name Pa-ta-dal, or Lean Bull. After that the keepers of the medicine stick bore the same name.
Konate carried the medicine stick in the Sun-dance, for several years, and then handed it on to his nephew K'a-ya-nti, or Falls-over-a-bank, who became Lean Bull the second—but the white people called him Poor Buffalo.