Oliver Drew awoke the next day after the fire dance in the _ramada_ which had been assigned to him. He felt as if he had been passed through a stamp mill, so sore were his muscles and so burned and blistered were feet and legs. He had been carried to his bed of green willow boughs directly after the dance, where he had slept until nearly nightfall. Then he had been awakened and given food. After eating he fell asleep once more, and slept all night, his head in the silver-mounted saddle that Bolivio had made. He dragged himself from the shakedown and went and sat at an opening in the booth. The _ramada_ of the California Indian is merely an arbourlike structure built of newly cut limbs of trees, their still unwithered leaves serving to screen the occupants from outside eyes. The birds were singing. Up the steep mountainside back of the reservation the goats and burros of the Showut Poche-dakas browsed contentedly on buckthorn and manzanita bushes. There was the smell of flowers in the drowsy air, mingling strangely with that indescribable odour that permeates an Indian village. It was noticeably quiet outside. Doubtless the Indians were enjoying an early-morning siesta after some grilling orgy of the night before. Oliver groaned with the movements necessary to searching his pockets for cigarette materials. His groan was mimicked by a familiar voice in the doorway. Jessamy Selden entered. "I've been listening for a sound from you," she chirruped. "My, how you slept! All in?" "Pretty nearly," he said. She came and sat beside him on a box. "Are you badly burned?" "Oh, no. I guess your courtplaster helped some. But I'm terribly sore. And, worst of all, I feel like an utter ass!" "Why, how so?" He snorted indignantly. "I went nutty," he laughed shortly. "I have lost the supreme contempt which I have always had for people who go batty in any sort of fanatical demonstration, like that last night. I've seen supposedly intelligent white folks go absolutely wild at religious camp meetings in the South, and I always marvelled at their loss of control. Now I guess I understand. Hour after hour of what I went through the other night, with the chanting and wailing and the constant rattle of those confounded cherry stones, and the terrible heat, and men and women giving out all about me, and the perpetual thud-thud of bare feet--ugh! I wouldn't go through it again for ten thousand dollars." "I thought it best not to warn you of the severity of it beforehand," she announced complacently. "Very few white men have ever danced the fire dance, and only one or two have held out to the end. Of course failure to do so signifies that the powers working against the affiliation are too strong to be overcome. These men who failed, then, did not become brothers of the Showut Poche-dakas." "Lucky devils!" "Here, here!" she cried. "Don't talk that way. You're glad, aren't you?" "I'm tickled half to death."