Cal had no idea how hard he had been straining at his fetters, spurred by the mosquitoes. He made an unintentional jerk with his right arm as the snake disappeared, and was startled by a discovery.
"Loose?" he said to himself. "Then I can loosen it more. I won't disturb either of those fellows, but I must scratch these mosquito-bites."
A pull, another pull, and that forked stick began to come up, for one of its legs had been put down in a gopher's hole, and had no holding. Out it came, slowly, softly, and Cal's right hand was free to reach over and help his left. That stake was hard pulling, but it came up at last, and then the ankles could be set free.
"I'll drive them all down again hard," said Cal to himself, and he did so.
"Let them wonder how I got out," he added; "but there isn't any use in my trying to run away. They'd only catch me and kill me at once."
He rose to his feet, and it occurred to him that his safest place might be by one of the smouldering camp-fires. The short June night was nearly over, and the dawn was in the tree-tops when Cal walked away from the shadow of the great cypress. He had a sort of desperate feeling, and it made him singularly cool and steady. He did not meet anybody on his way. His first discovery, as he drew near the fire, was that the Apaches had found plentiful supplies in the packs of the Mexican mules. They knew how to make coffee, too, for there was a big tin coffee-pot nearly full. Cal put it upon some coals to heat, and then he saw a tin cup lying on the ground, a box of sugar, a piece of bacon, and a fragment of coarse corn-cake.
"That'll do," he said to himself. "I may as well eat."
The coffee boiled quickly, and Cal sat with a cup of it in one hand, while with the other he held a stick with a slice of bacon at the fire end of it. He did not know what was happening under the cypress.
One wrinkle-faced brave opened his beady black eyes and looked at the place where the staked-out captive had been. The mocking smile he had begun flitted away from his lips.
"Ugh!" he exclaimed as he sprang up and kicked his comrade, and in an instant more two dreadfully puzzled Apaches were examining the forked stakes which ought to have had a white boy's wrists and ankles in them. Hard driven into the ground were all four, but the white boy? Where was he?