"I suppose I could, if they came to fight me. But I don't want to kill anybody. I thought you said you were feeling more like a white man."
"Steve, I don't know how I'd feel if I had a white shirt on, and a suit of civilized clothes. I'm a good deal of a savage yet, as it is."
"I never saw anything very savage about you."
"I'm on the war-path now, Steve, after my old enemies. Let's make as good time as we can before dark. After that, we'll have to go carefully till the moon's up."
They were advancing a good deal more rapidly than the Apaches had been able to do over that same pass, hindered by their long train of tired pack-ponies, and their women and children.
It was not a difficult trail to follow, for the lodge-pole ends, dragging on the ground, had so deeply marked it that a man like Murray could have found it in the dark.
That was precisely what he did, after the sun sank behind the western mountains, and the deep shadows crept up from the ravines and covered everything.
After the moon rose it was easier work, and Steve thought he had never seen anything more beautiful than was the moonlight on the quartz cliffs, and the forest, and the little lakes in the deep valleys, and on the foaming streams which came tumbling down the mountain-sides from the regions of perpetual snow above.
Perhaps he was right, for hardly anybody has ever seen anything more beautiful in its way than such a moonlight view as that.
There was no time to stop and gaze, for Murray pushed on as fast as possible without using up their tough and wiry mustangs.