But long before we pitched camp in the evening, we had had a hearty laugh over the morning clouds.
The Boca Grande was an "Indian place," and strategically speaking there was no point in it that was fit to camp in, no point where, aided by cotton-woods, willow-bushes, cane-brake, long grass, broken ground, or the river bed, a band of Indians might not have approached unobserved within a few yards of a traveller. We trusted to luck, therefore, and chose a site without reference to the Apaches. The odds, of course, were always long against their showing at any given place, but there was never any certainty about it; and this was one of their haunts.
"Indians!" said the Colonel when some one alluded to them. "Well, if I kill four I shall be satisfied. If they come we can't help it; but they'd better not!—they won't. They know more in a day than we could tell them in a week. What a battle it would be, though, if they did come! Gettysburg and those kind would be just flirtations to it. There'd be you charging 'em; and Navajo, he'd get around behind them, and take them in rear, and scare the quill feathers out of them. And there'd be Joe raking them fore and aft, and enfilading them, and out-manœuvring them, and reconnoitring and changing his front, and just a-sousing it to them red-hot all the time. And as for me, I'd sit right here on this stone, under the bank, and sing to them, just to lure them on, like the Lorelei, and let you boys have all the glory of killing them. Or, maybe, I'd get on one of the six-shooter horses—a six-shooter horse is a heap better than a six-shooting gun in these cases—I'd get on one of them and go right back to Ascension to fetch up some help for you. I'm not wanting to put myself forward, anyhow; there isn't anything mean about me."
"That'd be all right, Colonel," said Navajo; "we should know where to find you when there was any fighting to be done. The boys do say that you're on hand then—sure!"
"How do you want these potatoes cut up?" irrelevantly inquired Joe, who was phlegmatically attending to business, and peeling some potatoes for supper.
"Cut them up just as you'd cut up the Apaches, Joe," said the Colonel.
"Well, how are they going to be cooked?"
"Saratoga chips are good enough for me," suggested the modest Navajo.
"Saratoga chips go then. Joe, you hear what the gentleman says," observed Don Cabeza. He was "bossing" the cooking himself that evening, and at that moment was engaged in stirring some beans that he was frying in the Mexican style, bacon-fat being substituted for lard. Cook-like he tasted them now. "Well, there!" he ejaculated admiringly—"there! When I get through with this, it will make you laugh. You boys won't know whether you are here, or sitting at the corner table at Delmonico's."
"No," said Joe, with a twinkle of dry humour in his kindly eyes, "we shan't know the difference. I always have beans and bacon-fat at Delmonico's—when there's enough to go round, that is."