Only Nan-ta-je could understand much that Mike said. The Yavapai language was different from straight Apache. And why Nan-ta-je understood Yavapai, Jimmie presently found out.
This evening of December 27, two days after the Captain Burns column had been met, something evidently was up. Patron Jack had received orders from Major Brown to park his mules in close, along a picket line, “in a place easy of defence.” That was one hint.
“‘Find heap Injuns, poco tiempo (in little while),’ those scouts keep sayin’, do they?” grumbled Jack. “Humph! Looks like ‘heap Injuns’ might be goin’ to find us, mebbe!”
And now as Jimmie, having finished his duties for the evening, made way through the early dusk to look up Micky and listen to the stories of the scouts, he noted that Major Brown and the six officers and Chief Guide Archie MacIntosh were in a group around a little fire, talking low with one another.
The soldiers, wrapped in their cavalry overcoats, huddled also, in messes, smoking and joking. They might have been waiting for the time to roll in their blankets, but somehow they all seemed to be waiting for something else.
A little apart from the cavalry camp was the scouts’ camp; Chief Big Mouth’s White Mountains in one place, the Pimas in another. The Apaches certainly knew how to make themselves comfortable. They stuffed their moccasins with dry grass, to keep their feet warmer, and slept two or three together in snug beds among the rocks.
This evening they were having an especially good time. They were roasting and eating pieces of a mule that had died from poison. Micky was squatting and tearing at a chunk, like the rest of them, near one of their little fires.
With greasy mouth he grinned amiably as Jimmie approached to squat beside him.
“Come and eat, Boy-who-sleeps,” he greeted, in Apache.
“I have eaten. I am full,” explained Jimmie. Poisoned mule was rather more than he could stomach, although when with the Chiricahuas he had eaten almost anything.