make a new kind of
Sun-dance shield, and also an a-po-te, or sacred forked staff, that
should be a medicine staff and have magic powers.

Toward morning the medicine spirit left, saying:

"Help is near."

Every bit of this Konate firmly insisted was true, although white men
claimed that he dreamed. For, listen:

Meanwhile the Painted-red party were riding on, and in the Staked Plain
they met six Comanches, bound to Mexico after plunder. They spoke to
the Comanches regarding Konate, and asked them to cover his body so
that the wolves should not get it.

This the Comanches promised to do, and continued to the Sun-mountain
Spring where Konate had been left to die.

But when they reached the spring, they found Konate alive and stronger
than when his comrades had bid him goodby! That astonished them. They
then knew that he was "medicine." Therefore they washed him, and gave
him food, and putting him on an extra horse they turned back and took
him home.

The village, and all the tribe, also, were astonished to see him again.
As proof that he had been visited by the medicine spirit, he made the
medicine shield, of a new design, and the apote, or sacred forked
stick. He took the name Pa-ta-dal, or Lean Bull. After that the
keepers of the medicine stick bore the same name.

Konate carried the medicine stick in the Sun-dance, for several years,
and then handed it on to his nephew K'a-ya-nti, or Falls-over-a-bank,
who became Lean Bull the second--but the white people called him Poor
Buffalo.

This apote was a two-pronged stick about four feet long, decorated with
wild sage. It was smooth and had no bark, and was brought out only
once a year, for the Sun-dance. The keeper of it used it for beating
time, in the dance. At the close of the dance it was stuck, forks up,
in the ground in the center of the medicine lodge, and left until the
next year.

When the stick was eighteen years old Konate's nephew planted it as
before, at the close of the Sun-dance, in the center of the medicine
lodge on the plain; and when the Kiowas returned, the next summer, for
another Sun-dance, they discovered that the apote had been planted the
other end up, and was putting forth green leaves!

For a stick eighteen years old, without bark, to do this, was certainly
great medicine. No one now might doubt the story of Konate, to whom
the taime spirit had talked, under the bough shelter by the
Sun-mountain Spring.

None of the Kiow