"You should not be afraid for me with Joe, father, for we are brothers sworn," said Walter, and he told his father how they had mixed the blood of their arms in the arrow-maker's hut after they had come back from their first journey on Waban.
"Well," said Mr. Baker, who had not heard of this before, "I know that they set great store by these superstitious customs, but I have not much faith in the word of a Paiute when he is dealing with a white man. However, you had better go on with this hunting trip. Take Hank with you, and Joe's father, and do not be gone more than five days at the outside."
Hank was one of Mr. Baker's vaqueros, and very glad to get off for a few days' hunting on the blunt top of Waban. On the Monday following they left the Baker ranch for the mountain. As the two boys rode up the boulder-strewn slope it set them talking of the first time they had gone that way on their fruitless hunt for arrow points about the foot of Winnedumah, and of all that happened to them at that time. The valley lay below them full of purple mist, and away by the creek of Tres Pinos the brown, wattled huts of the campoodie like great wasps' nests stuck in the sage. Hank and Joe's father, with the pack horses, were ahead of them far up the trail; Joe and Walter let their own ponies lag, and the nose of one touched the flank of the other as they climbed slowly up the steep, and the boys turned their faces to each other, as if they had some vague warning that they would not ride so and talk familiarly again, as if the boiling anger of the tribes in the valley had brewed a sort of mist that rose up and gloomed the pleasant air on the slope of Waban.
"Joe," said Walter, "my father says if it came to a fight between the white settlers and the Paiutes, that you would not hold by the word we have passed."
"That is the speech of a white man," said Joe.
"But would you?" the other insisted.
"I am a Paiute," said Joe; "I will hold by my people, also by my word; I will not fight against you."
"Nor I against you, but I would not like to have my father think you had broken your word."
"Have no care," said the Indian, "I will not break it."
Mr. Baker looked anxiously after his son as he rode to the hunting on Waban; he looked anxiously up that trail every hour until the boy came again, and that, as it turned out, was at the end of three days. For the trouble among the Indians had come to something at last,—the wasps were all out of nest by the brown creeks, and with them a flight of stinging arrows. The trouble began at Cottonwood, and the hunting party on Waban the second day out saw a tall, pale column of smoke that rose up from the notch of the hill behind the settlement, and fanned out slowly into the pale blueness of the sky.