"You better wait till summer."
"Oh!" She lifted her head from the fire as one who takes careful note of instructions. "Nex' summer?"
"Well, summer's the time for squaws to travel."
"I come nex' summer," she said.
By-and-by Nicholas returned with a new parki and a pair of wonderful buckskin breeches—not like anything worn by the Lower River natives, or by the coast-men either: well cut, well made, and handsomely fringed down the outside of the leg where an officer's gold stripe goes.
"Chaparejos!" screamed the Boy. "Where'd you get 'em?"
"Ol' Chief—he ketch um."
"They're bully!" said the Boy, holding the despised rabbit-skin under his chin with both hands, and craning excitedly over it. He felt that his fortunes were looking up. Talk about a tide in the affairs of men! Why, a tide that washes up to a wayfarer's feet a pair o' chaparejos like that—well! legs so habited would simply have to carry a fella on to fortune. He lay back on the sleeping-bench with dancing eyes, while the raw whisky hummed in his head. In the dim light of seal-lamps vague visions visited him of stern and noble chiefs out of the Leather Stocking Stories of his childhood—men of daring, whose legs were invariably cased in buck-skin with dangling fringes. But the dashing race was not all Indian, nor all dead. Famous cowboys reared before him on bucking bronchos, their leg-fringes streaming on the blast, and desperate chaps who held up coaches and potted Wells Fargo guards. Anybody must needs be a devil of a fellow who went about in "shaps," as his California cousins called chaparejos. Even a peaceable fella like himself, not out after gore at all, but after an Orange Grove—even he, once he put on—He laughed out loud at his childishness, and then grew grave. "Say, Nicholas, what's the tax?"
"Hey?"
"How much?"