“Ai-ai!” said his mother softly,––“to the people of my land the pine is known as the first tree to come from the Mother Earth at the edge of the ice robe on her bosom. So say the ancients, and for that reason is it sacred to the gods––and to the sacrifices of gods. Have you, my son, woven a crown of sacrifice?”
But Tahn-té laughed, and thrust in it the scarlet star blossom growing in the timber lands of the Navahu.
“If I am made sacrifice I will have a blood strong, living reason,” he said, with the gay insolence of a young god walking on the earth.
But the older men did not smile at the bright picture he made with the blood-red stars in the green of his crown. They knew that even untried youth may speak prophet words, and they made prayers that the wise woman of the twilight land might not see the day when her son became that which he had spoken.
He carried with him a strange burden:––an urn or jar of ancient days dug from one of the buried cities of the Hopi deserts. On it was the circle of the plumed serpent, and the cross of red and of white. It was borne on his back by a netted band of the yucca fibre around his brow, and in it were young peach trees, and pear trees––the growing things of the mystic seeds given to the medicine-men of the Hopi the day of the boy’s birth.
Seeds also were being carried, but it was the wish of the mother that her son carry the growing things into the great valley of the river P[=o]-s[=o]n-gé.
Even into the great rift of the earth called Tzé-ye did he carry it, where the cliff homes of the Ancient Others lined the sides of the cañon and the medicine-men of Ah-ko spoke in hushed tones because of the echoing walls, and of the strong gods who had dwelt there in the days before men lived and died.
“The dead of the Ancient ones are hidden in many hollow places of the stone,” explained one of the men who spoke the language of Te-hua people. “And it is good medicine for the man who can walk between these walls where the Divine Ones of old made themselves strong. You do not fear?”