Somehow suddenly he had a sense of freshness, an illumination, as it were a vision, of the early morning light striking through a network of bare trees upon the shimmering reaches of a river.  And there on the bank lay his ball-sticks,—­quite good and sound then, he would have staked his life.  And now a picture was before him,—­being a man of fancy, he thought in pictures,—­a picture of old Cheesto the Rabbit holding the ball-sticks half hidden in the folds of his great fur robe and wading out into the ice-cold water to restore them.  And old Cheesto, he reflected, was one of the cheera-taghe of Ioco, and could work a spell quite as well as the Great Bear, who had gone to bed for the winter two weeks ago, and had not heard of ball-sticks within the memory of man,—­perhaps not since he was a Cherokee himself, and playing with the rest on the course at Tennessee Town.

In fact, old Cheesto, in common with many men not Cherokees, cared little for the public weal when it interfered with private interest.  But he had not realized how much he had jeopardized the success of Ioco Town in cutting the netting of the ball-sticks.  He had imagined the incompleteness of the racket would merely show Amoyah as incompetent, render his play futile and ineffective, and discredit him with both friend and foe.  Never, however, had the play of any one man been so important and conspicuous as his to-day when the bewitched ball-sticks became the salient feature and the living tradition of the match between Ioco and Niowee.  For despite these points, thus lost by supernatural agency to Niowee, the bewitchment of the ball-sticks only served to illustrate the superior skill of the Ioco team, and to embellish their victory.

Amoyah had nothing but his imagination to support his theory, but it seemed singularly credible to Altsasti, to whom he rehearsed it, finding her seated on the ground before the door of her winter house in great dreariness of spirit, that he should in playing so well have won nothing and merely jeopardized the game.

“I am afraid of that Great Bear,” she declared, eying the ball-sticks askance as he came up.

Then revealing his theory of the spell that old Cheesto had wrought upon him in Tus-ka-sah’s interest, Amoyah proposed a counter-spell which would defeat Tus-ka-sah.

“But Cheesto can still send you trouble if you have a wife,” she argued.

“Ah, no,” the specious Amoyah replied.  “Everybody knows that a man’s wife makes him all the trouble that he needs.”

To save him from these woes devised by others Altsasti undertook to give him all the trouble he needed.  But he seemed quite cheerful in the prospect, and as she cooked the supper within doors he sat at the entrance, much at home, singing, “Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah!  Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah!”

Tus-ka-sah upbraided the magician with the result of this victory, by which he was defeated.  And the wise man threw up eyes and hands at his ingratitude.