“Maybe. There’ll be a time,” replied Freegift. “There’ll be a time when the flag’ll float over this very spot. But we won’t need any thousand. Five hundred of us under Cap’n Pike could take the whole country. An’ now we know a way in.”
“I’ve half a notion that the lieutenant wasn’t so sorry to be made prisoner, after all,” Stub’s father remarked to him, on the way home. “There’s something secret about this that he doesn’t tell. As that soldier friend of yours said, in case of war—and war over this borderland dispute is likely to break out any day—the army will know what’s ahead of it.”
“They’ll let Lieutenant Pike go, won’t they?”
His father chuckled.
“They’ll have to. He’s not the kind of man they can keep. They can’t prove he’s a spy, for he’s in uniform (what there is of it), and his orders are plain to read.”
This day was March 4. It was two weeks later, or March 18, when at last Lieutenant Saltelo brought in Sergeant Meek and Corporal Jerry Jackson, Terry Miller, John Mountjoy, poor John Sparks and Tom Dougherty, Baroney, Pat Smith and the few miserable horses and the main baggage. There was great rejoicing, again, in Santa Fe.
Sergeant Meek was taken at once to Governor Alencaster, but ’twas safe to say that the governor would find out little from him. Stub sought the other men out, at the barracks. John Sparks and Tom were unable to walk; they had lost their feet, and the most of their fingers; Baroney and Pat, and, they said, the sergeant, too, were in bad shape, from the march through the snows, to the stockade; but they all welcomed Stub.
“Where’s the cap’n?”
“He’s gone to Chihuahua.”
“And what are ye doin’ here, then? Did you run off from him? Say!”