WHITE SEEKERS OF TREASURE
When Alvarado marched his band of adventurers into the pueblo Ua-lano to the sound of tom-toms and flutes of welcome, an Indian woman with a slender boy stood by the gate and watched the welcome of the strangers.
An exceedingly reckless, rakish lot they were––this flower of the Mexican forces who the Viceroy was only too willing should explore all lands, and seas, so they kept themselves away from the capitol.
The women and the children shrank back as the horses clattered in. Some laughed to cover their fear, others threw prayer meal, and their fright made the commander notice the blanketed figure of the woman whose eyes alone shone above the draperies held close, and who stared so keenly into each white face as they passed.
“Who is the dame in the mask of the blanket?” he asked of his host Chief Bigotes––the courteous barbarian who had crossed seventy leagues of the desert to ask that his village be honored by the god-like ones from the south.
Bigotes looked at her, did not know, but after inquiring came back and spoke.
“It is a strange thing but it is true,” said the interpreter, “she is called the One from the Twilight Land. She went as a girl from Te-hua to Ah-ko for study with the medicine people of one order there. 30 One night it was as if she go into the earth, or up in the sky. No one ever see her any more. It was the year of the fire of the star across the sky. Now she comes from the west and so great a medicine woman is she that leading men are sent to guard her on the trail to the Te-hua people––and to guard her son.”
“Faith! Your strangers are a handsome pair. The boy would make a fine page in a civilized land. He is the fairest Indian I’ve seen.”
The boy knew that his mother and himself were objects of query, and stood stolid, erect and disdainful,––the stranger should see that all their clanking iron, their dominating swagger, and their trained animals could not make him move an eyelash of wonder.
But to his mother he said: