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Where's their camp?" asked Pine, with a significant flourish of the black-snake, but the Indian boy looked him unflinchingly in the face without a sound or a motion. "Speak, now," began Pine; but Sile had finished answering some hurried questions from his father, and he now asked one for himself. "I say, Yellow Pine, didn't I grab him first? Isn't he my prisoner as much as he is yours?"
Sile thought of Aladdin and his wonderful lamp; then he thought of the California miners; then he shut his eyes for a moment. Then he went on digging, and he was hard at it when a tall form stooped over him and the voice of Yellow Pine exclaimed, "I'd call it If the youngster hasn't lighted onto a placer and scooped the biggest kind of a pocket! Sile, you've done it.
He could not tell why, until Jonas remarked to him, "If you hadn't pulled straight, your plunder'd be in the 'Pache camp 'bout now, scalp and all. It was jest a question of grit and shootin'. I'm powerful glad you made out to throw yer lead to the right spot." So was Sile, but it was not easy, somehow, for him to make up his mind that he had really killed anybody.
He was almost afraid lest the pale-faces should send him some help and so take from him part of the glory of his fresh achievement. There was little danger of that, as Sile was soon to discover. He hurried back after his fish in a state of such excitement that he very nearly forgot that he was in a new country.
All his vanity and ambition came pouring back upon him, and he almost felt as if he had captured that squad of pale-faces and was bringing them in as prisoners. He dashed forward at once, with Sile on one side, Yellow Pine on the other, and the rest following, except a camp-guard of two miners. Less than an hour later all the Nez Percé band came out under the trees to see what was coming.
"How?" said Sile, as he held out his hand to the loosened captive. "How?" said Two Arrows, and he said it a little sullenly, but he had been glancing from Pine's face to Sile's and understood pretty well that the latter had stopped the proposed work of the black-snake. "Make him a present of something, Sile," said his father. "Here give him this."
He tears down mouldy walls and lets the sunshine in. Pullin' up what bad-smellin' weeds he can in the gardens of the poor, and transplantin' some of the overcrowded posy beds of the rich into the bare sile, makin' 'em both look better and do better. I set store by him.
They'll know exactly what it means." Sile had a curious sense of bashfulness about it, but he followed his father, and in a few minutes more the rough, bearded, red-shirted fellows were giving him three of the most ringing cheers he had ever heard. Ha-ha-pah-no and Na-tee-kah looked at him with something that was half wonder.
"Beyond question," said Roger Eliot quietly, "they believe their team has at least an even chance for the game; otherwise, not half so many would have made the journey to watch it." "It must be on account of their new ketcher," muttered Sile Crane. "I cal'late they think he's the whole cheese; but mebbe they'll find aout he ain't only a small slice of the rind. What's he look like, anyhaow?"
The members of the mining party were already divided into "watches," taking regular turns, and Sile and a man named Jonas were in the first watch with Yellow Pine. That gave him a chance for an unbroken sleep when his work was done. What was also good, it gave him a rest to get sleepy in, and to let all the steam of his excitement get away from his head.
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