"My boy," said Bowie, "you come along with me. I'll take care of you. You shall have a rifle, pistols, knives, blankets, horses, anything you want. Now, Red Wolf, look!" He pointed at the covering they were putting on. "Heap hide! No tell! Dollars lie still!"
"Red Wolf shut mouth," was all the spoken reply, but his eyes blazed with the pride he felt over the reception of his "find" by the white hero. It was almost like being already a chief to be on intimate, confidential terms with so celebrated a warrior, with a leader whose ordinary manner was as haughty almost as that of Castro.
A few handfuls of dust, a careful wiping out of foot- and hand-marks, and then the secret of the wall was as safe as it had ever been.
Bowie, however, lingered for a moment, looking at the shattered adobe.
"One thing more is true," he muttered. "All that stuff was found and coined in this country. There is more where it came from, wherever the mines and placers may be. It stands to reason that the old Mexicans didn't get it all out. That makes me believe Tetzcatl! Cortez didn't, couldn't, have gotten hold of all the gold the Aztecs had above-ground when he came here. The Spaniards knew there was more. I'll go after it."
Back went the two discoverers to the cook-room and to their rations, and none who saw them come could have found upon their faces a trace of the excitement they had shown over their bags of doubloons and dollars.
Two hours later all the animals belonging to the party were feeding peacefully in the grassy open, and behind a knoll, not far from some of them, lay Colonel Bowie. His long, heavy "Mississippi rifle" was thrown forward across the knoll. Just behind him, among some withered weeds, lay the Lipan boy, as if he did not now feel willing to be far away from his white chief. He was watching him closely, and the thought in his mind almost escaped at his lips, so clear was the meaning that he read in the motions of the marksman.
"Big Knife sight deer," he thought. "Long shoot. Whoop! Comanche!"
His whoop was uttered aloud as the fire flashed from the rifle-muzzle, and the report was answered by a chorus of yells from among the dense masses of the chaparral.
"Tally one," said Bowie, coolly. "This business is going to cost Great Bear something. I'll get a bead on him next. Six yesterday and five to-day. I'll lie still and load up, though. It's close quarters."