of a maid or the marriage of a man that day.

A runner had been sent to Povi-whah from Kat-yi-ti. He gave his
message, and stayed to eat while other runners took the trail, and
before the sun had moved the width of a hand across the sky, the
villages of Kah-po and Tsa-mah and Oj-ke were starting other runners
to Ui-la-ua and far Te-gat-ha and at Kah-po the head men gathered to
talk in great council over the word brought from the south.

For the word was that the men of the iron and the beards and the white
skins were again coming to the land of the People of the Sun. They
came in peace, and searched for the lost padres. A man of the gown was
with them for prayers, and a Te-hua man who had been caught by the
Navahu long winters ago and traded to the land of green birds. The
Te-hua man said the white people were good people, and he was guiding
them to the villages by the big river, P[=o]-s[=o]n-ge.

CHAPTER VII

THE SILKEN SCARF

Of the many godly enterprises set afoot for exploration and conquest
in New Spain of the sixteenth century, not all have chronicles
important enough for the historian to make much of. But there were
goings and comings of which no written record reached the archives.
Things forbidden did happen even under the iron heel of Castilian
rule, and one of the hidden enterprises grew to be a part of the life
of the P[=o]-s[=o]n-ge valley for a time.

Not that it was unchronicled, but there was a good reason why the
records were not published for the Spanish court.

It was a pretty romantic reason also--and the usual one, if we may
trust the world's judgment of the foundation of all trouble. But a
maid tossing a blossom from a Mexic balcony could not know that the
stranger from Seville to whom it was thrown was the son of an
Eminence, instead of the simple gentleman named Don Ruy Sandoval in a
royal letter to the Viceroy. With him travelled his tutor whose
tutelage was past, and the position a difficult one for even the
Viceroy to comprehend.

Since the youth rebelled at the habit of a monk--he had been given a
space for adventure under godly surveillance. The godly surveillance
limped a trifle at times. And because of this did Don Ruy walk again
in the moonlight under the balcony and this time more than a blossom
came to him--about the stem of a scarlet lily was a flutter of white!
The warm light of the Mexic moon helped him to decipher it--a page
from Ariosto--the romance of Dona Brada