"Yes, a little." "Are you the chief of the village?" "What do you want?" "We require water and a roof to shelter us." "You are not alone, I see; from whom do you come?" "We are nothing but travellers wandering through the forests to seek for plants and animals with healing properties." "But you are armed?" "Well, we have a child to protect, and the brutes of the forest are fierce." "Are you speaking the truth?" I then called Lucien, who doffed his hat to the old man and saluted him. "Child, may God bless you!" "Are we to consider ourselves your guests?" "Yes, you are the guests of Coyotepec; come along with me." Sumichrast and l'Encuerado also approached the horseman, who dismounted and then led the way. The latter conversed with the Indian in the Mistec tongue, an idiom which Lucien alone could understand, he having been taught it by l'Encuerado. From the way in which the old man scanned us, I imagined that l'Encuerado had represented us to him as white sorcerers of no ordinary skill. Coyotepec--or "Stone Wolf"--might have been about seventy years of age. He was born in this ravine, to which he had given the name of the "_Mountain's Mouth_," though I am ignorant of the reason for the designation. He had been taken, when very young, by one of his uncles to Puebla, but he had soon left the city with the intention of rebuilding the paternal hut, and of knowing nothing of the world beyond his own domain. His six children were all married and lived near him, and the little colony numbered as many as thirty individuals. He was an Indian of the Tlascalan race, as robust and nimble as a man of forty, of middle height, with a brown skin. He wore a hat made of palm-tree straw, and was dressed in a white woollen jacket, fastened in round the waist like a blouse; cotton drawers, scarcely covering his knees, completed his costume. "What is the nearest town to this?" asked Sumichrast. "Puebla," was the answer. "How far off is it?" "About eight days' journey." As the usual day's journey of the Indian is ten leagues a day, the distance must have been about eighty leagues.