Slowly the wound was healing. He was surprised, almost hurt, to discover a growing longing for the companionship of his kind. His thoughts, now, were more and more often filled with pleasant memories of Sons-ee-ah-ray, memories of Geronimo, of the other Be-don-ko-he who were his own people. He wondered how they fared. And then one morning he turned his face northward toward Arizona.
Old Nakay-do-klunni, the trouble maker, was dead; the renegades had returned to the reservations or been driven in scattered bands across the boundary into Mexico. The troops were enjoying a well-earned rest. They were building roads, digging boulders out of parade grounds, erecting telegraph lines up and down over red-hot mountains and white-hot plains, until an entire troop would not have rendered out a teacupful of fat. Always there were detachments scouting, patrolling.
Lieutenant King commanded a detachment thus engaged. A parched, gaunt, service sergeant was, nominally, second in command. He had forgotten more about soldiering and Indian fighting than all the shave-tail second lieutenants in the army knew, and Lieutenant King, by way of becoming a good officer, realized this and utilized the sergeant for the very purpose for which the “old man” had sent him along—as mentor, guide, instructor. However, the sergeant agreed when Lieutenant King suggested that it might not be a bad plan to patrol a little in the direction of Billings ranch, for the sergeant had delicious memories of the prune pies of the Billing’s Chinese cook.
Arizona nights can be quite the softest, loveliest nights in all the world, and Lieutenant King thought that this was such a one as he sat in the dark shade of a great cottonwood before the Billings ranch house where he could glimpse the half profile of the girl in the light filtering through a window from an oil lamp burning within the building. Beyond the girl, down beside the corrals, twinkled the camp fire of his men and, subdued, there floated to his ears the sound of voices, laughter, the music of a harmonica.
“There is something I want to ask you, Chita,” he said, presently. He had discovered that everyone called her Chita, that it embarrassed her and everyone within earshot when he addressed her as Miss Billings.
“Shoot,” said Chita.
He wished that she would not be so disconcerting. Sitting and looking at that profile that any goddess might well have envied put one in a mood—a delicious, exalted mood—but “shoot” and other conversational peculiarities tended to shatter illusions. He was silent, therefore, rearranging his thoughts to an altered mood.
“Well,” she inquired presently, “what’s eatin’ you?”
King shook his head and grinned. It was no use. “What is consuming me,” he said, “is curiosity.”
“That’s what killed the cat,” she returned, laughing. “It aint a good thing to encourage out thisaway.”