I said, "Well, lead out." And for an hour we rode northwest and came to the breaks of the North Fork, and here for an hour and a half we cautiously reconnoitered, finding the water-holes but no camp.
We watered our horses here.
The Mexican dismounted. Seating himself on the ground, he placed both hands over his face and eyes, and there he sat in mute stillness for several minutes. More than a year later he told me at Fort Sill what then passed through his mind.
When he arose he said, "Now I am sure I can find them, but we can't do it and get back to the boys and get them there by daylight." He said they were surely around the next bend in the draw above the long water-hole we had visited on the South Fork; said he could take us all across a plain from where the boys were, and get there yet by daylight.
Back we went to where the crowd was. They were restless, and some were grumbling at our long absence. For it was now near morning. The wind was coming from the south, and several of the men declared they could smell a grease-smoke which emitted from all camps, more or less, where much meat or marrow-bones were roasted. I said nothing, as I could not smell a smoke, on account of a catarrh.
I made a full report of our trip, and told them that Hosea said if we would move quickly we could yet get there and surprise them. Campbell was outspoken in his belief that the Mexican was deceiving us on account of the Mexican meat-hunters who frequented this region from Fort Sumner on the Pecos river, in New Mexico, and that he believed some of them might be with these same Indians, and that Hosea wished to spare them. So Hosea, faithful Hosea, was under a cloud.
"Let us hurry," said Freed.
Out of the cavern we started; across the arm of the plain we went. When broad daylight of the 18th day of March, 1877, came, we were three miles from the camp and a hard fight.
Just as the dawn came, Hosea and I rode spiritedly ahead. I was now riding the large nervous chestnut-sorrel horse. When we were a mile and a half ahead of the advancing column we saw two Indians riding leisurely toward their ponies, which were southeast of their camp. They evidently had not discovered us. They went out of sight behind a rise in the ground.