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The medicine man shook his head without speaking. "My grandmother says 'Nothing," pursued Nashola, "but I know that cannot be. Is it one of the things that I must not ask and that you may not tell me because you are a sorcerer and I am only a boy?" Secotan was silent so long that Nashola thought he did not mean to reply at all. Even when he spoke it did not seem to be an answer.
Deep dwelling in Nashola was that born leadership that makes real men see through the long-established doubts and terrors of their race, who can distinguish the false from the true, who can go forward through shadowy perils to the clear light of knowledge and success.
We call them the Seven Brothers of the Sun." Nashola was silent, waiting, for he knew from his friend's voice that there was more that he wished to say. "Your mother, who is dead, was not of our blood, they tell me. Your father took her from another tribe and they had brought her captive, from the north of us, so that she is no kin of ours.
Will you come to my lodge, will you learn from me, will you follow in my way?" Nashola tried to speak, choked and tried again. "I cannot do it," he said huskily. "Why?" There was a sharp note of wonder, hurt friendship, even of terror, in the man's voice. "The people of our village say you are not like other men," said the boy.
"The voices of the wind and the breakers and of the thunder all cry the same message," he declared, "and wise men have learned that it warns them to hug the land. You must heed your grandmother, even though her words are shrill and often repeated." He would say no more, so Nashola went away, pondering his answer as he walked down the hill.
"Perhaps we may be able to understand him." In the quiet dawn, when calm had followed the night's storm, the ship ran in toward a rocky headland to send a boat ashore. Yet when it had been lowered and Secotan had dropped into it, he turned to see Nashola standing on the deck above, making no move to follow. "I am not coming, Secotan," he declared steadily.
Through the dragging hours Nashola sat beside him, listening with strained ears to every sound the soft moving of a snake through the grass before the door, the nibbling of a field mouse at the skin of the tent, the sharp scream of a bird in the wood captured by a marauding owl.
Only half understanding, they knew, at least, that Nashola had been the means of their medicine man's downfall. Frenzied hands seized them both and dragged them headlong down toward the water.
"Are you both quite comfortable?" the Beeman inquired. "Very well, then I'll begin." Nashola did not live in fairyland, although there were seasons when his country was so beautiful that it might well have belonged to some such enchanted place.
It goes all the way back, does the record, to the time when our several times great-grandfather bought the first tract from the Indian, Nashola.
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