"Yes. A little. I saw something like it long ago. But I don't know what it means."
"Rita? Ni-ha-be?"
"What is it, Dolores?"
"Go. You will be in my way. I must cook supper for the chief. He is hungry. You must not go beyond the camp."
"What did the talking leaf say to you?" asked Ni-ha-be.
"Nothing. It is a great medicine leaf. I shall keep it. Perhaps it will say more to Rita by-and-by. Go."
The Apaches, like other Indians, know very little about cookery. They can roast meat and broil it, after a fashion, and they have several ways of cooking fish. They know how to boil when they are rich enough to have kettles, and they can make a miserable kind of corn-bread with Indian corn, dried or parched and pounded fine.
The one strong point in the character of Dolores, so far as the good opinion of old Many Bears went, was that she was the best cook in his band. She had not quite forgotten some things of that kind that she had learned before she became a squaw. Nobody else, therefore, was permitted to cook supper for the hungry chief. It was a source of many jealousies among his other squaws, but then he was almost always hungry, and none of them knew how to cook as she did.
She was proud of it too, and neither Ni-ha-be nor her adopted sister dreamed of disputing with her after she had uttered the word "supper."
They hurried out of the lodge, therefore, and Dolores was left alone.