The Apache boy who had played bell-wether pressed to Jimmie’s horse.
“Chi-cowah,” he said, pointing. That was Apache for “My home.”
Now the party appeared satisfied. They scattered their fire, and struck down into a narrow trail that crossed the bottom of the valley. A peculiar sweetish smell hung in the misted air. This, Jimmie guessed, was from the steaming pits wherein the hearts of the mescal, or century plants, were being roasted.
They glimpsed several squaws and children gathering foodstuff in the brush. As they filed through a little draw or rocky pass they were hailed loudly by an Apache sentinel posted above. He could not be seen, but the chief replied. The pass opened into a grassy flat concealed by the usual high crags and timbered ridges. Here was the Apache camp or rancheria (ran-cher-ee-ah), located along a willow-bordered creek.
Fifty or sixty of the Apache brush huts or jacals were sprinkled all up and down the flat, and as soon as the party entered, a tremendous chorus of welcome sounded. Women shrieked, children screamed, dogs barked and mules brayed. Right into the center of the camp marched the party, and stopped.
A circle of staring women and children, and a few men, surrounded. Other squaws bustled to take the horses and mules from the dismounting warriors. Jimmie was told to get off. Feeling lonesome and miserable, he saw close in front of him a boy who did not seem to be Indian at all, for he had fiery red hair and brick-red freckles and only one eye, which was blue!
Yes—a red-headed, one-eyed, blue-eyed boy, rather runty, in only a whitish cotton girdle, and moccasins. Evidently he dressed that way—or undressed that way—all the time, for his body and limbs were burned darker than his face.
Jimmie was not granted much space for staring back into that one blue eye. He was slapped upon the shoulder, “Aqui (Here)!” grunted the chief, in Spanish, and strode on through the circle. So Jimmie followed, hobbling at best speed.
The chief went straight to a scrub-oak tree, with a hut beneath it, and an Apache sitting in the shade of it, on a deer hide before the hut. By the manner with which Jimmie’s Apache spoke to the sitting Apache, who did not rise, it was plain to be seen that the sitting Apache was the principal chief, and that Jimmie’s Apache was maybe only a captain.