Russ and Rose had thought of something the night before, and they had planned this ride in order to do it. They had remembered Black Bear's wild Indians and the strange soldiers in blue. The two older Bunker children decided to try to find those strange people again, and the man and woman and baby at the brookside.
Just who those "white settlers" could be, and why they were living in that part of the ranch away from Mr. Cowboy Jack's nice house, neither Russ nor Rose had been able to make up their minds. Of course, there was a mystery about it, and a mystery was bound to worry the little Bunkers a good deal. They were persistent, and Russ, at least, seldom gave up any problem until he had solved it.
"I saw a picture in a big book at the ranch," said Rose to her brother, "and in it a frontiersman—that's what the book called him—was dressed like that man we saw chopping wood—the man with the squirrel-tail on his cap and his long hair tied in a queue."
"Did you? But that must have been the way they wore their hair a long, long time ago."
"It said in the book under the picture that trappers and hunters out West here wore their hair long and tied in queues long after they stopped doing so anywhere else. Some of the white hunters wore a scalp-lock like the Indians. I guess maybe that was a scalp-lock," said Rose.
"They are not dressed like soldiers are now," Rose interrupted. "But in the book there were pictures of soldiers in the Mexican War—When was that, Russ?"
Russ had read a little American history in his class the term before and thought he knew something about the Mexican War. He told Rose it had been fought long after the Revolution.
"Well, the pictures showed soldiers in the Mexican War dressed like those we saw the other day. Or, anyway, very much like them."
"Goodness me!" exclaimed Russ, "don't you suppose these soldiers know that war is over?"