For some distance the wagon bounced over the rocks and logs of the cañon and then all were told to dismount. The wagon was pulled into a thicket by the Indian, the man with whiskers, and the woman, who, Cayuse discovered, wore a woman’s garment and shaker bonnet over a man’s clothing and face.
The outfit passed as a frontiersman and his wife and household goods, wherever they met white people, and when they met reds the Indian guide explained to them that these were white refugees who were fleeing from their own people to take up their abode with the red brothers.
Little Cayuse could now see how he had been entrapped, but he was not yet able to understand how he came to be known and why he was wanted.
The party made its way up the bed of the cañon for probably three miles and then came to the end of it. They were confronted by a solid wall, probably one hundred feet high.
Near the end of the cañon was quite a growth of conifers, and behind this hedge a green little valley of swale land. Here a herd of ponies were tethered, and with these Navi and the mules were left.
Little Cayuse’s hands were tied behind him and one of the white men held the end of the lariat, as the quartette toiled up the side of the mountain. The one dressed as a woman had discarded that garb, after there was little or no danger of meeting white people.
At the top of the wall the rocks seemed to fall away for a few rods to a flat-bottomed timber land, under which the moss was soft and green. The growth was protected from the high winds by the surrounding peaks.
The Indian Slow Foot led the way through the shadowy forest, where only the sighing of the winds in the evergreens overhead and the twitter of birds in the branches could be heard. In that soft, green moss not the sound of a footfall was heard, and after they had passed the moss sprang back into place, leaving no trail. It was damp, and dark, and velvety; pleasing to the eyes and to the feet.
Cayuse, who had spent the most of his life on the plains, from Mexico to Montana, had never seen anything like this. It was much as he had pictured the happy hunting ground—cool, and soft, and free from alkali dust, with plenty of dark pools for water and fish, fat antelope to be seen among the trees, where the red men swung and smoked from moon to moon.
Far across this beautiful land of trees they at last heard the shouts of children and the barking of dogs. Ten minutes later they came upon a group of tepees and found themselves in an Indian village, where fat and lazy bucks lay smoking and enjoying the plunder taken from the white settlers and supply trains, and stolen from the forts; all this in addition to the bounty of the Great Father at Washington.