Barnwell had told Brewster about him also. "His name is Cairness,—Charles Cairness,—and he's got a lot of fool theories too," he explained. "He goes in for art, makes some pretty good paintings of the Indians, and has picked up some of their lingo. Made himself agreeable to the squaws, I guess. The interpreter says there's one got her nose cut off by her buck, on his account."
Brewster suggested that he thought Crook had put a stop to those mutilations, but the official shrugged his shoulders.
"I don't know how true it was, and I certainly ain't going to look her up in her rancheria to find out."
The hero of the episode rode in the ambulance, sitting on the front seat, holding his carbine across his knees, and peering with sharp, far-sighted blue eyes over the alkali flats. Occasionally he took a shot at a jack rabbit and brought it down unfailingly, but the frontiersman has no relish for rabbit meat, and it was left where it dropped, for the crows. He also brought down a sparrow hawk wounded in the wing, and, having bound up the wound, offered it to Brewster, who took it as an opening to a conversation and tried to draw him out.
"Barnwell tells me," he began, "that you have picked up a good deal of Apache."
"Some Sierra Blanca, sir," said the soldier. It was respectful enough, and yet there was somewhere in the man's whole manner an air of equality, even superiority, that exasperated the lieutenant. It was contrary to good order and military discipline that a private should speak without hesitation, or without offence to the English tongue.
Brewster resented it, and so the next thing he said was calculated to annoy. "He says you are quite one of them."
"He is mistaken, sir."
"Have you an Indian policy?"
Cairness's eyes turned from a little ground owl on the top of a mound and looked him full in the face. "I really can't see, sir," he said, "how it can matter to any one."