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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 Kiowas dared to touch the apote, this time or to stay near the medicine lodge. The dance was held at another place.
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.
When, ten years later, or in October, 1867, the Kiowas met in a treaty council with the United States, near the present town of Medicine Lodge on Medicine Lodge Creek, southern Kansas, they were enabled to show that the apote had grown to be a large tree.
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