wn seeking,"
he remarked. "I am on my way to kill the Sun. Now I know that I can do
it." And sounding his war-whoop he went on.

Next day he came to the edge of the world and looked off into space,
where thousands of careless people had fallen, and there he passed the
night under a tree. At dawn he stood on the brink of the earth and the
instant that the Sun appeared he flung the magic ball full in his face.
The surface of the Sun was broken into a thousand pieces that spattered
over the earth and kindled a mighty conflagration. Ta-Vwots crept under
the tree that had sheltered him, but that was of no avail against the
increasing heat. He tried to run away, but the fire burned off his toes,
then his feet, then his legs, then his body, so that he ran on his hands,
and when his hands were burned off he walked on the stumps of his arms.
At last his head alone remained, and that rolled over hill and valley
until it struck a rock, when the eyes burst and the tears that gushed
forth spread over the land, putting out the flames. The Sun was
conquered, and at his trial before the other gods was reprimanded for his
mischievous pranks and condemned thereafter to travel across the sky
every day by the same trail.

THE COMANCHE RIDER

The ways of disposing of the Indian dead are many. In some places ground
sepulture is common; in others, the corpses are placed in trees. South
Americans mummified their dead, and cremation was not unknown. Enemies
gave no thought to those that they had slain, after plucking off their
scalps as trophies, though they sometimes added the indignity of
mutilation in killing.

Sachem's Head, near Guilford, Connecticut, is so named because Uncas cut
a Pequot's head off and placed it in the crotch of an oak that grew
there. It remained withering for years. It was to save the body of Polan
from such a fate, after the fight on Sebago Lake in 1756, that his
brothers placed it under the root of a sturdy young beech that they had
pried out of the ground. He was laid in the hollow in his war-dress, with
silver cross on his breast and bow and arrows in his hand; then, the
weight on the trunk being released, the sapling sprang back to its place
and afterward rose to a commanding height, fitly marking the Indian's
tomb. Chief Blackbird, of the Omahas, was buried, in accordance with his
wish, on the summit of a bluff near the upper Missouri, on the back of
his favorite horse, fully equipped for travel, with t