The savages had ridden long. There was an endless line of black blots rising and falling on the prairies back of them. The stampede of the Del Sol herd was sufficient to break the trance of slaughter.
Spears in hand, naked, their arms red to the shoulders, their bodies red to the waist, a group of the riders broke away from their chase and came up, grinning and shouting, to where they saw the white men huddled. They had taken their time. The Comanches entertained but little fear of the whites. They were insolent lords of the far Southwest, raiding the feeble Mexicans as they liked and even imperiously telling the Anglo-Saxon frontiersman when he must cease advancing or even pull back his frontier lines. They always had held the best of the cattle range as well as the best of the buffalo range of Texas, and had kept the cowman out.
These had no fear now of the whites. They carried with them proof of that. Repeating their own tribal history of grim sense of humor, at some sutler’s store looted far to the west they had practiced one of the jests they had been known to employ in early border times. They had gathered bolts of flannel, bales of gaudy calico, from which they had liberally taken decorations for their horses. Not one of the latter that did not have attached to his mane and tail such strips of calico as long and rough riding had left him. It was the pleasant Comanche practice to tie one end of a bolt of cloth or calico to the tail of a horse and then to ride off, leaving the fabric to unwind as it listed and the horse to run as it chose. These wild decorations, unknown of origin, still clung in colored fragments to the blood-stained ponies which they rode. The ends of the prints fluttered in the prairie wind, mocking the flowers in their own remaining hues.
No herd of cattle could have withstood the sight of this wild phantasmagoria. The men who owned these felt that their own time had come. Without command, each man dropped low behind his bed roll, his rifle resting above his bent arm.
“Don’t let than in, men—but don’t shoot yet! They’ve got nothing but spears!”
It was the voice of Dan McMasters which arose. He alone of them all was standing, rifle in hand. He threw up his hand in the command to halt as the Red men came on in, slapping his rifle stock.
The Comanches paid little attention to any command, but made no immediate motion of hostility. Their leader was a great-chested man with wide chin and mouth and narrow eyes. Jabbering in his own tongue, two-thirds Spanish, he grinned as he came on close up to the rifles which covered him and his men. At length he threw up his own hand carelessly, indifferently, curiously, as though he now would see what was to be found hereabouts.
“How, amigo! How, amigo!” called out McMasters. No one had chosen him as leader, but none now denied him the place. “Usted Yellow Hand?”
The leader rode out carelessly.
“Si,” said he. “Me Yellow Han’. Habla Español?”