Almost the first person encountered by Jimmie, when he rode stiffly into Bowie, on the third of February, was Micky the Red-head, as lively as ever, after his own long trip with the Captain Davis column.
“Where is Geronimo, Cheemie?” hailed Micky.
“He will come.”
“Well, if he doesn’t, we will go get him,” asserted Micky. “We will bring him back little by little. You look as though you had been a long way, Cheemie.”
“More than a thousand miles,” laughed Jimmie. And he felt it.
“That’s enough for you,” declared Chief Packer Tom Moore, when Jimmie reported. “You stick around, now, and take things easy.”
The post was still talking of Captain Crawford’s one march of eighteen hours with only the twenty minutes’ halt; and of his tragic death, at the end, when he had won his goal.
Lieutenant Maus, with Lieutenant Faison and Lieutenant Shipp, Tom Horn and the scouts, was ordered back below the border, to camp until the Chiricahuas signalled for the talk.
Jimmie was laid up with his leg, for several weeks. And at Bowie the general waited impatiently for the news from the lieutenant’s camp.