scription on the blade. He lent these
relics to Mr. Harling, who brought them home with him. Charley and I
scoured them, and they were on exhibition in the Harling office all
summer. Father Kelly, the priest, had found the name of the Spanish
maker on the sword and an abbreviation that stood for the city of
Cordova.

'And that I saw with my own eyes,' Antonia put in triumphantly. 'So Jim
and Charley were right, and the teachers were wrong!'

The girls began to wonder among themselves. Why had the Spaniards come
so far? What must this country have been like, then? Why had Coronado
never gone back to Spain, to his riches and his castles and his king?
I couldn't tell them. I only knew the schoolbooks said he 'died in the
wilderness, of a broken heart.'

'More than him has done that,' said Antonia sadly, and the girls
murmured assent.

We sat looking off across the country, watching the sun go down. The
curly grass about us was on fire now. The bark of the oaks turned red
as copper. There was a shimmer of gold on the brown river. Out in the
stream the sandbars glittered like glass, and the light trembled in the
willow thickets as if little flames were leaping among them. The breeze
sank to stillness. In the ravine a ringdove mourned plaintively, and
somewhere off in the bushes an owl hooted. The girls sat listless,
leaning against each other. The long fingers of the sun touched their
foreheads.

Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was
going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the
red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black
figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet,
straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On
some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The
sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the
horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained
within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share--black
against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing
on the sun.

Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball
dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields
below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough
had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.

XV

LATE IN AUGUST the Cutters went to O