The Heritage of the Sioux Part 13

"Well, I calc'late mebby yore right," Applehead admitted, and began to pick his way down over the rocks. "Ef them's Injuns, the bigger we stack up in camp the better. If it's Ramon 'n' his bunch, I want t' git m'

hands on 'im."

He must have turned the matter over pretty thoroughly in his mind, for when the two reached camp he had his ideas fixed and his plans all perfected. He told Luck that somebody was working down the draw in the dark, and that it looked like a Navvy trick; and that they had better be ready for them, because they weren't coming just to pa.s.s the time of day--"now I'm tellin' ye!"

The nerves of the Happy Family were raw enough by now to welcome anything that promised action; even an Indian fight would not be so much a disaster as a novel way of breaking the monotony. Applehead, with the experience gathered in the old days when he was a young fellow with a freighting outfit and old Geronimo was terrorizing all this country, sent them back in compact half circle just within the shelter of the trees and several rods away from their campfire and the waterhole.

There, lying crouched behind their saddles with their rifles across the seat-sides and with ammunition belts full of cartridges, they waited for whatever might be coming in the dark.

"It's horses," Pink exclaimed under his breath, as faint sounds came down the draw. "Maybe--"

"Horses--and an Injun laying along the back of every one, most likely,"

Applehead returned grimly. "An old Navvy trick, that is--don't let 'em fool ye, boys! You jest wait, 'n' I'll tell ye 'when t' shoot, er whether t' shoot at all. They can't fool ME--now I'm tellin' yuh!"

After that they were silent, listening strainedly to the growing sounds of approach. There was the dull, unmistakable click of a hoof striking against a rock, the softer sound of treading on yielding soil. Then a blur of dark objects became visible, moving slowly and steadily toward the camp.

"Aw, it's just horses," Happy Jack muttered disgustedly.

Applehead stretched a lean leg in his direction and gave Happy Jack a kick. "They're cunnin'," he hissed warningly. "Don't yuh be fooled--"

"That's Johnny in the lead," Pink whispered excitedly. "I'd know the way he walks--"

"'N' you THOUGHT yuh knowed how he jingled his dang bell," Applehead retorted unkindly. "Sh-sh-sh--"

Reminded by the taunt of the clever trick that had been played upon them the night before, the Happy Family stiffened again into strained, waiting silence, their rifles aimed straight at the advancing objects.

These, still vague in the first real darkness of early night, moved steadily in a scattered group behind a leader that was undoubtedly Johnny of the erstwhile tinkling bell. He circled the campfire just without its radius of light, so that they could not tell whether an Indian lay along his back, and beaded straight for the water-hole. The others followed him, and not one came into the firelight--a detail which sharpened the suspicions of the men crouched there in the edge of the bushes, and tingled their nerves with the sense of something sinister in the very unconcernedness of the animals.

They splashed into the water-hole and drank thirstily and long. They stood there as though they were luxuriating in the feel of more water than they could drink, and one horse blew the moisture from his nostrils with a sound that made Happy Jack jump.

After a few minutes that seemed an hour to those who waited with fingers crooked upon gun-triggers, the horse that looked vaguely like Johnny turned away from the water-hole and sneezed while he appeared to be wondering what to do next. He moved slowly toward the packs that were thrown down just where they had been taken from the horses, and began nosing tentatively about.

The others loitered still at the water-hole, save one--the buckskin, by his lighter look in the dark--that came over to Johnny. The two horses nosed the packs. A dull sound of clashing metal came to the ears of the Happy Family.

"Hey! Get outa that grain, doggone your fool hide," Pink called out impulsively, crawling over his saddle and catching his foot in the stirrup leather so that he came near going headlong.

Applehead yelled something, but Pink had recovered his balance and was running to save the precious horsefeed from waste, and Johnny from foundering. There might have been two Indiana on every horse in sight, but Pink was not thinking of that possibility just then.

Johnny whirled guiltily away from the grain bag, licking his lips and blowing dust from his nostrils. Pink went up to him and slipped a rope around his neck. "Where's that bell?" he called out in his soft treble.

"Or do you think we better tie the old son-of-a-gun up and be sure of him?"

"Aw," said Happy Jack disgustedly a few minutes later, when the Happy Family had crawled out of their ambush and were feeling particularly foolish. "Nex' time old granny Furrman says Injuns t' this bunch, somebody oughta gag him."

"I notice you waited till he'd gone outa hearing before you said that,"

Luck told him drily. "We're going to put out extra guards tonight, just the same. And I guess you can stand the first shift, Happy, up there on the ridge--you're so sure of things!"

CHAPTER XV. "NOW, DANG IT, RIDE!"

Indians are Indians, though they wear the green sweater and overalls of civilization and set upon their black hair the hat made famous by John B. Stetson. You may meet them in town and think them tamed to stupidity.

You may travel out upon their reservations and find them shearing sheep or hoeing corn or plodding along the furrow, plowing their fields; or you may watch them dancing grotesquely in their festivals, and still think that civilization is fast erasing the savage instincts from their natures. You will be partly right--but you will also be partly mistaken.

An Indian is always an Indian, and a Navajo Indian carries a thinner crust of civilization than do some others; as I am going to ill.u.s.trate.

As you have suspected, the Happy Family was not following the trail of Ramon Chavez and his band. Ramon was a good many miles away in another direction; unwittingly the Happy Family was keeping doggedly upon the trail of a party of renegade Navajos who had been out on a thieving expedition among those Mexicans who live upon the Rio Grande bottomland.

Having plenty of reasons for hurrying back to their stronghold, and having plenty of lawlessness to account for, when they realized that they were being followed by nine white men who had four packed horses with them to provide for their needs on a long journey, it was no more than natural that the Indians should take it for granted that they were being pursued, and that if they were caught they would be taken back to town and shut up in that evil place which the white men called their jail.

When it was known that the nine men who followed had twice recovered the trail after sheep and cattle had trampled it out, the renegades became sufficiently alarmed to call upon their tribesmen for help. And that was perfectly natural and sensible from their point of view.

Now, the Navajos are peaceable enough if you leave them strictly alone and do not come snooping upon their reservation trying to arrest somebody. But they don't like jails, and if you persist in trailing their lawbreakers you are going to have trouble on your hands. The Happy Family, with Luck and Applehead, had no intention whatever of molesting the Navajos; but the Navajos did not know that, and they acted according to their lights and their ideas of honorable warfare.

Roused to resistance in behalf of their fellows, they straightway forsook their looms, where they wove rugs for tourists, and the silver which they fashioned into odd bracelets and rings; and the flocks of sheep whose wool they used in the rugs and they went upon a quiet, crafty warpath against these persistent white men.

They stole their horses and started them well on the trail back to Albuquerque--since it is just as well to keep within the white men's law, if it may be done without suffering any great inconvenience. They would have preferred to keep the horses, but they decided to start them home and let them go. You could not call that stealing, and no one need go to jail for it. They failed to realize that these horses might be so thoroughly broken to camp ways that they would prefer the camp of the Happy Family to a long trail that held only a memory of discomfort; they did not know that every night these horses were given grain by the camp-fire, and that they would remember it when feeding time came again.

So the horses, led by wise old Johnny, swung in a large circle when their Indian drivers left them, and went back to their men.

Then the Navajos, finding that simple maneuver a failure--and too late to prevent its failing without risk of being discovered and forced into an open fight--got together and tried something else; something more characteristically Indian and therefore more actively hostile. They rode in haste that night to a point well out upon the fresh trail of their fleeing tribesmen, where the tracks came out of a barren, lava-encrusted hollow to softer soil beyond. They summoned their squaws and their half-grown papooses armed with branches that had stiff twigs and answered the purpose of brooms. With great care about leaving any betraying tracks of their own until they were quite ready to leave a trail, a party was formed to represent the six whom the Happy Family bad been following. These divided and made off in different directions, leaving a plain trail behind them to lure the white men into the traps which would be prepared for them farther on.

When dawn made it possible to do so effectively, the squaws began to whip out the trail of the six renegade Indians, and the chance footprints of those who bad gone ahead to leave the false trail for the white men to follow. Very painstakingly the squaws worked, and the young ones who could be trusted. Brushing the sand smoothly across a hoofprint here, and another one there; walking backward, their bodies bent, their sharp eyes scanning every little depression, every faint trace of the pa.s.sing of their tribesmen; brushing, replacing pebbles kicked aside by a hoof, wiping out completely that trail which the Happy Family bad followed with such persistence, the squaws did their part, while their men went on to prepare the trap.

Years ago--yet not so many after all--the mothers of these squaws, and their grandmothers, had walked backward and stooped with little branches in their hands to wipe out the trail of their warriors and themselves to circ.u.mvent the cunning of the enemy who pursued. So had they brushed out the trail when their men had raided the ranchos of the first daring settlers, and had driven off horses and cattle into the remoter wilderness.

And these, mind you, were the squaws and bucks whom you might meet any day on the streets in Albuquerque, padding along the pavement and staring in at the shop windows, admiring silken gowns with marked-down price tags, and exclaiming over flaxen-haired dolls and bright ribbon streamers; squaws and bucks who brought rugs and blankets to sell, and who would bargain with you in broken English and smile and nod in friendly fashion if you spoke to them in Spanish or paid without bickering the price they asked for a rug. You might see them in the fifteen-cent store, buying cheap candy and staring in mute admiration at all the gay things piled high on the tables. Remember that, when I tell you what more they did out here in the wilderness. Remember that and do not imagine that I am trying to take you back into the untamed days of the pioneers.

Luck and the Happy Family--so well had the squaws done their work--pa.s.sed unsuspectingly over the wiped-out trail, circled at fault on the far side of the rocky gulch for an hour or so and then found the false trail just as the Indian decoys had intended that they should do. And from a farther flat topped ridge a group of Indians with Dutch hair-cuts and Stetson hats and moccasins (the two hall-marks of two races) watched them take the false trail, and looked at one another and grinned sourly.

The false trail forked, showing that the six had separated into two parties of three riders, each aiming to pa.s.s--so the hoofprints would lead one to believe--around the two ends of a lone hill that sat squarely down on the mesa like a stone treasure chest dropped there by the G.o.ds when the world was young.

The Happy Family drew rein and eyed the parting of the ways dubiously.

"Wonder what they did that for?" Andy Green grumbled, mopping his red face irritatedly. "We've got trouble enough without having them split up on us."

"From the looks, I should say we're overhauling the bunch," Luck hazarded. "They maybe met on the other side of this b.u.t.te somewhere.

And the tracks were made early this morning, I should say. How about it, Applehead?"

"Well, they look fresher 'n what we bin follerin' before," Applehead admitted. "But I don't like this here move uh theirn, and I'm tellin'

yuh so. The way--"

"I don't like anything about 'em," snapped Luck, standing in his stirrups as though that extra three inches would let him see over the hill. "And I don't like this tagging along behind, either. You take your boys and follow those tracks to the right, Applehead. I and my bunch will go this other way. And RIDE! We can't be so awfully much behind.

If they meet, we'll meet where they do. If they scatter, we'll have to scatter too, I reckon. But get'em is the word, boys!"

"And where," asked Applehead with heavy irony, while he pulled at his mustache, "do yuh calc'late we'll git t'gether agin if we go scatterin'

out?"

Luck looked at him and smiled his smile. "We aren't any of us tenderfeet, exactly," he said calmly. "We'll meet at the jail when we bring in our men, if we don't meet anywhere else this side. But if you land your men, come back to that camp where we lost the horses. That's one, place we KNOW has got gra.s.s and water both. If you come and don't see any sign of us, wait a day before you start back to town. We'll do the same. And leave a note anch.o.r.ed in the crack of that big bowlder by the spring, telling the news. We'll do the same if we get there first and don't wait for you." He hesitated, betraying that even in his eagerness he too dreaded the parting of the ways. "Well, so long, boys--take care of yourselves."

"Well, now, I ain't so dang sh.o.r.e--" Applehead began querulously.

But Luck only grinned and waved his hand as he led the way to the south on the trail that obviously had skirted the side of the square b.u.t.te.

The four who went with him looked back and waved non-committal adieu; and Big Medicine, once he was fairly away, shouted back to them to look out for Navvies, and then laughed with a mirthless uproar that deceived no one into thinking he was amused. Pink and Weary raised their voices sufficiently to tell him where he could go, and settled themselves dejectedly in their saddles again.