"You may have my rifle to use as often as you like," said Walter, "but you must not lend it to any one in the campoodie, especially to Scar-Face. My father says he is the one who is stirring up all this trouble with the whites."
"The white men do not need any one to help them get into trouble," said Joe. "They can do that for themselves."
"It is the fault of the Indians," said Walter. "If they did not shoot the cattle, the white men would leave them alone."
"But if the white men come first to our lands with noise and trampling and scare away the game, what then will they shoot?" asked the Paiute.
Walter did not make any answer to that. He had often gone hunting with Joe and his father, and he knew what it meant to walk far, and fasting, after game made shy by the rifles of cattlemen, and at last to return empty to the campoodie where there were women and children with hungry eyes.
"Is it true," he said after a while, "that Scar-Face is stirring up all the Indians in the valley?"
"How should I know?" said Joe; "I am only a boy, and have not killed big game. I am not admitted to the counsels of the old men. What does it matter to us whether of old feuds or new? Are we not brothers sworn?"
Then, as the dinner was done, they ate each of the other's kill, for it was the custom of the Paiutes at that time that no youth should eat game of his own killing until he was fully grown. As they walked homeward the boys planned to get permission to go up on Waban for a week, after mountain sheep, before the snows began.
Mr. Baker looked grave when Walter spoke to him.
"My boy," he said, "I wish you would not plan long trips like this without first speaking to me. It is hardly safe in the present state of feeling among the Indians to let you go with them in this fashion. A whole week, too. But as you have already spoken of it, and it has probably been talked over in the campoodie, for me to refuse now would look as if I suspected something, and might bring about the thing I most fear."