CHAPTER XXIV.
A PALAVER.
Buffalo Bill opened the palaver.
“I have not come to smoke the peace pipe, but to talk,” he said. “If the talk of the Ute is good then we may smoke the peace pipe. If not, the soldiers and the scouts are ready for battle. They are many, and there will be more behind to come if they are not enough.”
“What has the paleface chief to say to Bear Killer, the chief of the Wasatch Utes?”
“The Wasatch? If you belong away over there in Utah what are you doing on this side of the great mountain?”
“That is the business of Bear Killer—not of the paleface. Bear Killer is like the wind; he goes wherever his spirit wills, and asks leave from no man. What is the talk of the paleface?”
“This chief will speak,” said Buffalo Bill, waving his hand toward Captain Meinhold, who came riding up with Wild Bill, thus making the conferring parties equal in numbers.
“Where are the two white captives—the girls who were in your possession?” asked the captain sternly.
The chief glanced off quickly toward the base of the cliff, where Mainwaring had declared he had seen the girls, and a look of pleasure lighted up his face, for he had supposed the whites had recaptured them already while the fight was going on.