Our friend was a philosophical fellow, as we have seen, and as the natural thing to do was to gather up the little piles of meal, tie them up in the extra shirt, and make off with them, he did it. There was no need now for him to trouble the village, so he quietly withdrew by the way he had come, and, guided by the excited sounds that still reached his ears, made a roundabout way back to the trail, striking it beyond the village. At the next water, he mixed some of the meal into a gruel and ate it. It was not very palatable, and again he thought of the good food at the Mission, from which he was now forever debarred. But a look at Big Flower, gleaming like a great golden mushroom in the sun, consoled him, as he thought of the wealth and power he would enjoy among his tribe by means of this unparalleled marvel. Night found him halfway between the Santa Mar'a Valley and the next higher one, to which the Spaniards who had first seen it had given the name of Ballena, from the long mountain, like a whale in outline, that shuts it in on the northwest. He found water, made a fire in the time-honored Indian way by rubbing two dry sticks together, and cooked the remaining meal. There was enough for a good supper, and some over, which he made into little cakes, drying them hard on the hot stones. He put on all the clothes again to sleep in, and made a wind-break as before with the umbrella. It was really more comfortable than the hard bed in his hut at the Mission, and he felt more than contented, even jubilant, over the change in his fortunes. In the morning he said his prayers again before Big Flower, and started on his way early. He had pulled on the extra clothing at night over what he was then wearing, and as the morning was cold, and the trail good, so that the clothes would not be harmed, he did not take them off, except the extra stockings, nor change so as to wear his own outside. Thus he again presented the tricolor aspect that had paralyzed the natives he had met. It now occurred to him to make a little experiment, a sort of trial canter, of his new profession, upon the Indians in the next valley. He was not far now from his own village of the Elcuanams, and might as well be getting into training. He would avoid surprising any stragglers at the next village, and would get into touch with the head men, explaining that he was the long-lost son of Kla-quitch, who had escaped after all these years from the Mission, and had come back, learned in all the knowledge of the white men and armed further with this most wonderful appliance of magic, to take his place as hereditary medicine-man of his tribe. He should see by that means what sort of impression he would be likely to make on his own people. Nominally they were Christians; but they were hardly ever visited by the priest, and he knew that the bulk of them were still much as in his father's day, and still placed reliance on the fetishes of the shamans.