Naiche asked wonderingly, "You would give good horses to white soldiers?"
"These horses are too spent to serve us any longer," Geronimo said. "Let them go."
Tie ropes were slipped. Following the smell of water, the horses were off at a gallop.
Geronimo led his warriors forward. He stopped them just beneath the rim of the canyon in which the water hole lay. Again he thrust bits of brush into his headband and crawled forward to look.
The thirsty horses had come in and were crowding each other at the water hole. A young lieutenant was ordering his men to mount. A scout whom Geronimo had seen, but whose name he had never heard, was arguing with the lieutenant.
"Don't do it!" the scout said. "Don't do it, Lieutenant!"
"You say these horses were loosed by Geronimo's men?" the lieutenant asked.
The scout said, "Couldn't of been nobody else, an' every horse wears the Pratt brand. Geronimo must of stole them there. I figure we'll find the Pratt ranch burned an' maybe the Pratt brothers dead. But don't dash off in all directions thisaway."
"If Geronimo's lost his horses, he and his men are afoot!" the young lieutenant exclaimed.
"The only horses Geronimo ever lost was them our scouts or soldiers took away from him," the scout said. "He's turned these loose for some deviltry of his own. An' did you ever try to hunt Apaches when they was afoot?"