In his momentary search for an eloquent simile, the minister paused. “As pumpkin pies!” added the newspaper man with a chuckle; and he whipped out his notebook and pencil to jot down this brilliant thought, for he had conceived a very witty “story” which he would pound out for the Sunday edition. “Well,” said the Agency Physician, finally sucked into the whirlpool of discussion, “it seems to me that there is no room for crowing on either side. Indians are pretty much like white men; livers and kidneys and lungs, and that sort of thing; slight difference in the pigment under the skin. I’ve looked into the machinery of both species and find just as much room in one as the other for a soul!” “And both will go upward,” added the minister. “Like different grades of tobacco,” observed the Indian Agent, “the smoke of each goes up in the same way.” “Just so,” said the reporter; “but let us cut out the metaphysics. I wonder when this magical _cuggie_ is going to begin his humid evolutions. Lamentable, isn’t it, that, such institutions as rain prayers should exist on the very threshold of the Twentieth Century?” “I think,” returned the minister, “that the Twentieth Century has no intention of eliminating God! This medicine-man’s prayer, in my belief, is as sacred as the prayer of any churchman. The difference between Wakunda and God is merely orthographical.” “But,” insisted the cynical young man from the city, “I had not been taught to think of God as of one who forgets! Do you know what I would do if I had no confidence in the executive ability of my God?” Taking the subsequent silence as a question, the young man answered: “Why, I would take a day off and whittle one out of wood!” “A youth’s way is the wind’s way,” quoted the preacher, with a paternal air. “And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts; but what is all this noise about?” returned the reporter. A buzz of expectant voices had grown at one end of the oval, and had spread contagiously throughout the elliptical strip of shade. For with slow, majestic step the medicine-man, Mahowari, entered the enclosure and walked toward the centre. The fierce sun emphasised the brilliancy of the old man’s garments and glittered upon the profusion of trinkets, the magic heirlooms of the medicine-man. It was not the robe nor the dazzling trinkets that caught the eye of one acquainted with Mahowari. It was the erectness of his figure, for he had been bowed with years, and many vertical suns had shone upon the old man’s back since his face had been turned toward the ground. But now with firm step and form rigidly erect he walked. Any sympathetic eye could easily read the thoughts that passed through the old man’s being like an elixir infusing youth. Now in his feeble years would come his greatest triumph! To-day he would sing with greater power than ever he had sung. Wakunda would hear the cry. The rains would come! Then the white men would be stricken with belief!