B. M. BOWER: Historical Novels, Westerns & Old West Sagas (Illustrated Edition). B. M. Bower
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 passing 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 circumvent 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—passed 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 pass—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 gods 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 butte 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 grass 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 anchored 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 shore—” 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 butte. 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.
“Well, I ain’t so darned sure, either,” Lite Avery tardily echoed Applehead’s vague statement, in the dry way he had of speaking detached sentiments from the mental activities that went on behind his calm, mask-like face and his quiet eyes. “Something feels snaky around here today.”
Applehead looked at him with a glimmer of relief in his eyes, but he did not reply to the foreboding directly. “Boys, git yore rifles where you kin use ‘em quick,” he advised them grimly. “I kin smell shootin’ along this dang trail.”
Pink’s dimples showed languidly for a moment, and he looked a question at Weary. Weary grinned answer and pulled his rifle from the “boot” where it was slung under his right leg, and jerked the lever forward until a cartridge slid with a click up into the chamber; let the hammer gently down with his thumb and laid the gun across his thighs.
“She’s ready for bear,” he observed placidly.
“Well, now, you boys show some kinda sense,” Applehead told them when Pink had followed Weary’s example. “Fellers like Happy and Bud, they shore do show their ign’rance uh this here, dang country, when they up ‘n’ laff at the idee uh trouble—now I’m tellin’ yuh!”
From the ridge which was no more than a high claw of the square butte, four Indians in greasy, gray Stetsons with flat crowns nodded with grim satisfaction, and then made baste to point the toes of their moccasins down to where their unkempt ponies stood waiting. They were too far away to, see the shifting of rifles to the laps of the riders, or perhaps they would not have felt quite so satisfied with the steady advance of the