It was Niltci, the Navaho, flinging along Indian fashion on a pony, his elbows flopping jerkily, his whole body swaying with the loose abandon of a rag tied somehow to the saddle.
“Well?” said Sid, as the Navaho boy overtook them, “what’s become of Vasquez’s Apache scout?”
Niltci’s bronze face cracked once in a saturnine grin. “Quien sabe?” (Who knows!) he shrugged his dusty shoulders. “Me got hees pony!” That was all they ever had out of him about it.
“Them thar rails says we gotta lope along pronto, boys!” said Big John as he pushed the white mustang to the head of the column. “Yore schoolmarm friend has gone by hyar, in the cyars, shore’s yore a foot high. ’Cause why? I didn’t see no pony tracks headin’ down fer Tucson, nohow, comin’ down this valley.”
“Think he’s gone to Nogales, by train, John?” asked Scotty anxiously.
“Shore has! Or else he’s takin’ the jerkwater local out of Tucson to San Xavier, so he can reach the Papago Reservation ahead of us. We’ll be crossin’ thet Injun ole folks’ home soon as we git out’n these hills an’ we’ll shore hev trouble!”
Big John shook his head ominously and urged on the white mustang. For him the race for Red Mesa had already begun.
“Yes, but the Papagoes are harmless,” objected Scotty.
“Not this time of year!” put in Sid. “This is corn time with them, and every other buck is drunk on a ferment that they make of it. That Vasquez could arouse them to almost anything, now.—Hey, John?”
“Shore, them Injuns is bad medicine for all white men in November!” quoth Big John sententiously.