“Had I known you as I know you now we would have delayed a day in coming back.”
“That I might have finished my work?” I asked, touched by such generosity.
“Yes.”
“That means that you would have consented to the robbery.”
“Not to the robbery, but only to the measuring. The lines you make on paper do us no harm; the robbery only begins when the laborers of the pale-faces come to build the road for their fire-horse.”
He considered a while, and a thought was shaping in his brain of such nobility that I doubt if many white men would have been capable of entertaining it. At last he uttered it: “My white brother shall receive all the instruments again, and I will ask my father to allow him to finish measuring for the road. We will go with our warriors and protect him while he does this, and he shall send his papers to the men who wanted them, as well as their instruments, and so shall he make this first step towards the name and fortune he desires.”
“Winnetou,” I cried, moved beyond expression by a generosity which I could hardly fathom, “dear, noble, kind Winnetou, there is no one like you. I can never thank you.”
“There can never be thanks due me from you; my debt must always be greater than yours, and my father has said we shall be as one man with two bodies. But how are you to use this name and fortune? Not here among the Apaches. Will you then go away from us?”
“Yes, but not immediately.”
“We shall be sorrowful. You are to be given the power and rank of a chief of the Apaches. We believed you would stay with us always, even as Kleki-Petrah stayed to the day of his death.”