“You say strange things,” he muttered. “I think when they get crazy with the spirit to kill that they will kill us all. I do not stay to be killed––I go!”
Tahn-té staring at the emblems of holiness on the altar scarcely heard him.
“I go, Tahn-té,––I go if I have to swim the river with the ice.––Do you stay here to be killed?”
“I am here to learn many things––I learn but little yet, I cannot go.”
“But––if you die?”
“I think it is not yet that I die,” said Tahn-té––“There is much to do.”
“And––if I live to see––our people?”
“Tell my mother I am strong––and I feel her prayers when the sun comes up. Tell the governor I stay to learn what the white god does for the red men; when I have things to tell the people I will come back to Povi-whah.”
But the ice of that winter melted, and the summer bore its fruit, and the second spring time had come to the land before Tahn-té crossed the mesas and stood at his mother’s door.