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ing 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 headed straight for the waterhole. 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 212
ONE PUT OVER ON THE BUNCH
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 Indians 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 bet-213
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ter 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. " !N"ex' 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 5V;
" 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 illustrate.
As you have suspected, the Happy Family was not following the trail of Ramon Chavez and his 215
THE HERITAGE OF THE SIOUX
band. Eamon 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 Eio 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.
!N^ow, the Navajos are peaceable enough if you leave them strictly alone and do not come snoop-216
ing 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 I^avajos did not know that, and they acted according to their lights and their ideas of honorable warfare.
Eoused 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 217
THE HERITAGE OF THE SIOUX
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. 218
"NOW, DANG IT, RIDE!"
formed to represent the six whom the Happy Family had 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 had 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 hoof print here, and another 1 one there; walking backward, their bodies bent, their sharp eyes scanning every little depression, every faint trace of the passing of their tribesmen; brushing, replacing pebbles kicked aside by a hoof, wiping out completely that trail which the Happy Family had followed with such persistence, the squaws did their part, while their men went on to prepare the trap.