This day the young native who first hailed the Golden Hearted when he landed, by a lucky toss of the elbow sent the ball flying through the hole on the wise men's side. In a moment the spectators scrambled down from their seats and ran away as fast as they could go. The wise men stood looking after them in wide-eyed astonishment, and before they had time to get out of the alley the victor stripped them of their veils and then their tall hats looked like a piece of stove pipe with a cover over one end of it.
The Golden Hearted insisted that each man should give back whatever he had won in a bet on the game, and for each loss of this kind he gave both winner and loser a present, and promised to teach their sons and daughters how to weave cloth having figures in it. In such a way he taught them how to count, and to this day they have no other method of reproducing a pattern perfectly. Each stitch must be counted and only a certain number of each color put in, and all this must be carried in the head. The weavers are not allowed to write it down.
At nightfall the runners came in breathless with haste to say that the chief of the village was sending a councilor and official guide to welcome and escort the strange white men to his dwelling. But the Golden Hearted was not in a hurry to leave the fishermen and common people with whom he had spent the day, except for a short visit. When he returned he taught them how to make sun-dried bricks with which to build houses, also to shape the round water jars of brown pottery and how to ornament them and the gourds they drank from. The wise men assisted him in all this, and in time, the natives not only built comfortable houses for themselves but learned how to fashion many pretty designs of cornices and wall decorations out of stucco which they tinted many colors.
The first thing he did when he went to the village was to make the chief king, and then he ordered some of the wise men who were architects and engineers to lay out a splendid city and help the natives to build it. Before he came there were nothing but trails from one part of the country to the other and the simple tradesmen did not know how to exchange their wares. The Golden Hearted became the patron of the builders and traders and lived many years with the people of Aztlan.
While in that country, he occupied himself with the building of a sacred temple dedicated to those who served the Good Law. It had four beautiful halls facing the four cardinal points of the compass. That on the east was the Hall of Gold and its walls were almost covered with plates of the precious metal having delicately-chased pictures over its shining surface. To the west was the Hall of Emeralds and Turquoises where many gems were studded into the plaster. The south hall was finished in silver while the northern hall was made of jasper stuck with colored shells in curious patterns. In each room there was a tapestry of yellow, blue, white and red feather mosaic that was as fine as a painting and in some cases perfectly represented men and animals. In front of the main entrance for many years stood a winged lion cut out of granite holding an image of the Golden Hearted in his mouth.
The name of the city was Mayapan and the king who had been merely a village chief was the celebrated Cocomes of the olden times.
THE BALL PLAYER