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"Granny, do you know what the Indians use for dyeing colours?" asked Yan, harking back to his main purpose. "Shure, Yahn, they jest goes to the store an' gets boughten dyes in packages like we do." "But before there were boughten dyes, didn't they use things in the woods?" "That they did, for shure. Iverything man iver naded the good Lord made grow fur him in the woods." "Yes, but what plants?"
The men of Zonu have been promised by those that claim to be wise in the Law that their Lives which they have toiled at shall be theirs to possess for ever, yet the men of Zonu fear that Yahn is greater and overskilled in the Law. Moreover it hath been said that Time will bring the hour when the wealth of Yahn shall be such as his dreams have lusted for.
And ever Yahn lures more shadows and sends them to brighten his Lives, sending the old Lives out again to make them brighter still; and sometimes he gives to a shadow a Life that was once a king's and sendeth him with it down to the earth to play the part of a beggar, or sometimes he sendeth a beggar's Life to play the part of a king. What careth Yahn?
And thereto the shadows consented, that they might have gleaming Lives and have shadows for their servants, and this thing became the Law. But the shadows, each with his Life, departed and came to Zonu and to other lands, and there with experience they polished the Lives of Yahn, and cut them with human griefs until they gleamed anew.
It did not come that day, but at breakfast next morning Raften looked straight at Yan across the table, and evidently thinking hard about something, said: "Yahn, this yer room is twenty foot by fifteen, how much ilecloth three foot wide will it call fur?" "Thirty-three and one-third yards," Yan said at once. Raften was staggered.
"Biddy, give Yahn some bread." The loaf, evidently the only one, was cut up and two or three slices forced into Yan's plate. "Mebbe the butther is a little hoigh," exclaimed the hostess, noting that Yan was sparing of it. "Howld on." She went again to the corner shelf and got down an old glass jar with scalloped edge and a flat tin cover. It evidently contained jam.
Then Yahn shall wander away, a mean forgotten god, and perchance in some forsaken land shall haggle with the rain for a drop of water to drink, for his soul is a usurer's soul. And the Lives who knoweth the gods of Old or what Their will shall be? Upon an evening of the forgotten years the gods were seated upon Mowrah Nawut above Mlideen holding the avalanche in leash.
"Now, wud ye listen to thot, an' she knowin' that divil a clath hev we in the wurruld, an' glad enough to hev vittles on the table, let alone a clath," said Granny, oblivious of the wreck she was making of Biddy's pride. "Will ye hay tay or coffee, Yahn?" said Biddy. "Tea," was Yan's choice.
Scarce larger than a drop of water are the gleaming jewels that lie under the grasping talons of Yahn, and every jewel is a life. Men tell in Zonu that the earth was empty when Yahn devised his plan, and on it no life stirred. Then Yahn lured to him shadows whose home was beyond the Rim, who knew little of joys and nought of any sorrow, whose place was beyond the Rim before the birth of Time.
It was Raften who brilliantly solved this frightful mathematical problem and discovered a doughty champion in the thin, bright-eyed child. "Yahn," he said, offering him a two-foot rule, "can ye tell me how many foot of air is in this room for every scholar when the seats is full?" "You mean cubic feet?"
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