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True, it was a trifle old, and stiff in the joints, and even beginning to grow deaf, but, on the other hand, it was a very particular friend of Smoke's, and had fathered it from kittenhood upwards so that a subtle understanding existed between them. It was this that turned the balance in its favour, this and its courage.
Enough food for a month, with careful husbanding and appetites that never blunted their edge, was Smoke's and Labiskwee's judgment. Smoke apportioned the weight and bulk of the packs, yielding in the end to Labiskwee's insistence that she, too, should carry a pack.
Then he reined his pony to a bare spot on the grass-dotted tufa, and again dismounted. He looped Blue Smoke's fore feet, then threw him, and pulled his shoes with a pair of wire nippers, and stowed the shoes in his saddle-pockets.
Then they swooned again from the effects of the heat and the stifling smoke, and were speech less and motionless when Wat and Abel looked in. "We've 'ad hall hour trouble for nothink," said Wat disconsolately, as he felt them over. "The 'eat and smoke's killed 'em." "Not by a durned sight," slowly gasped Shorty. "Seen sicker dogs'n this git well. Nearly dead for a drink o' water, though.
The last visitor to Surprise Lake, was Smoke's conclusion, as he picked up a lump of gold as large as his doubled fist. Beside the lump was a pepper-can filled with nuggets of the size of walnuts, rough-surfaced, showing no signs of wash. So true had the tale run, that Smoke accepted without question that the source of the gold was the lake's bottom.
Those in the rear hailed it with acclaim. In the windless air it burned easily, and he led the way more quickly. "It's a sure stampede," Shorty decided. "Or might all them be sleep-walkers?" "We're at the head of the procession at any rate," was Smoke's answer. "Oh, I don't know. Mebbe that's a firefly ahead there. Mebbe they're all fireflies that one, an' that one. Look at 'em.
But Shorty went on kicking. "Watch out for your toes," was Smoke's only interference. "Sure; I'm usin' the heel," Shorty answered. "Watch me. I'll cave his ribs in. I'll kick his jaw off. Take that! An' that! Wisht I could give you the boot instead of the moccasin. You swine!" There was no sleep in camp that night.
Amelia never knew how the tide of public apprehension surged about her, nor how her next-door neighbor looked anxiously out, the first thing on rising, to exclaim, with a sigh of relief, and possibly a dramatic pang, "There! her smoke's a-goin'." Meantime, the tramp fell into all the usages of life indoors; and without, he worked revolution.
"Well, let's get started," he said. "Started hell!" Shorty exploded. "We stay right here an' rest you up an' feed you up for a couple of days." Smoke shook his head. "If you could just see yourself," Shorty protested. And what he saw was not nice. Smoke's face, wherever the skin showed, was black and purple and scabbed from repeated frost-bite.
May was telling a curious story about the traveler Catlin, when an ugly, diminutive Indian, wretchedly mounted, came up at a gallop, and rode past us into the fort. On being questioned, he said that Smoke's village was close at hand. Accordingly only a few minutes elapsed before the hills beyond the river were covered with a disorderly swarm of savages, on horseback and on foot.
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