was
taken.

But all those wonderful Hopi mesas with their fortresses on each, were
within the running time of a morning, and not in any of them were
there forests or living streams, or strange new things. Only the
clouds and the shadow of the clouds on the sand,--or the sun and the
glory of the sun on the world, made the heart leap with the beauty of
the land of the Hopi people. But here were new things each day.

When the boys of Ah-ko in friendly rivalry ran races and leaped great
spaces, and shot arrows into a melon with him--and then ate the
melon!--they asked how many years he had lived and he laughed and did
not know.

"I had so many," he said holding up the fingers of both hands and
pointing to his eyes,--"When I followed your men down the trail from
Walpi in Hopi land. But I have seen so much, and lived so much that I
must be very old now!"

This the boys thought a great jest, and said since he was old he could
not run races, or see straight to shoot, and he must let himself be
beaten. But the boys who tried to beat him were laughed at by the old
men who watched, and he was given a very fine bow to take on his
journey, and never any boy crossed those lands so joyously as he who
carried all the way the growing sprouts of the new trees.

And at Ah-ko a little tree from the urn, and some of the seeds were
given, but the winter to come was a hard winter, and the ice killed
them, so the fruit from the strange far-off trails was not for Ah-ko.

They had rested, and were about to depart, when Tahn-te, watching with
other boys the war between two eagles poised high above the enchanted
mesa, saw on the plain far below the figure of an Indian runner, his
body a dark moving line against the yellow bloom spread like a great
blanket of flowers from Mount Spin-eh down and across the land.

He only watched because the man ran well--almost as well as a
Hopi--and did not see in the glistening bronze body the herald of a
new day in the land.

At the edge of the cliff they watched to see him appear and disappear
in the length of the great stairway of the fortress. Some day each boy
among them would also be a runner in his turn for ceremonial reasons,
and it is well to note how the trusted men make the finish.

It is not easy to run up the two hundred foot wall of Ah-ko at the end
of a long trail, but this man, conscious of watchers, leaped the last
few steps and stood among them. Only an instant he halted, in surprise