He added a few rapid sentences in his own tongue, while Ping and Tah-nu-nu darted away to the edge of the chaparral and stood there, clinging to each other as if in terror.
"Colorado!" shouted Sam Herrick. "What on earth's got into Cold Spring?"
The colonel and the captain also retreated rapidly, shivering from the shock of a sudden cold bath, for they both were wet to the skin.
Twenty feet high sprang the water, with a sharp hiss and a report like a pistol-shot. The first leap subsided, but was instantly followed by another and another, each less lofty than the one before it. Then the stream became fairly steady, but with about three times its customary supply, so that quite a rill of water ran away across the quartz, to be absorbed by the thirsty sand and gravel among the bushes.
Neither Ping nor Tah-nu-nu nor the Chiricahuas could be induced to come near the fountain again, but all the white men gathered around it and made guesses as to what had made it jump.
"Something volcanic," said the captain.
"Been an earthquake somewhere, it may be," said the colonel.
All that evening there was more or less discussion of the remarkable performance of Cold Spring, and everybody missed the right guess. It was only a splash caused by the avalanche when it plunged into the mountain reservoir which supplied the chaparral and the sage-hens and the jackass rabbits and the other wild animals there with water. Nothing could well be more simple, and there was no soundness whatever in the grave remark made to Ping and Tah-nu-nu by the old Chiricahua.
"Ugh!" he said. "Manitou Water heap good medicine. Good Apache manitou. Kah-go-mish get away now. Keep all pony."