"You won't meet any red-skins," said Sam Herrick to a very melancholy ranchero. "They've all gone the other way. You can make better time on foot than you could a-driving a pack-mule. You'll git thar. Give the colonel my compliments and tell him that old Kah-go-mish ort to just love him. I never heard of a train given away for nothing before."
The ranchero nodded a sullen agreement with Sam, but he was not likely to give the message accurately to Colonel Romero.
The poor fellows started at once, with a plain enough trail to follow, and Sam looked kindly after them.
"They're in luck," he said. "They've nothing to do but to walk. Not even a mule to lead or a fence to climb. Colorado! But didn't old Kah-go-mish make a clean sweep."
"Left their skelps on 'em," said Bill.
"That was just cunning," replied Sam. "Some redskins haven't sense enough to let a skelp alone, but he has."
Only a little later the sentries and pickets posted by Captain Moore were all the human beings left in the camp at Cold Spring. They, too, were hidden among the bushes, and the proof that it was a camp at all consisted of three sacks of corn, a saddle, some camp-kettles and coffee-pots, and the smouldering camp-fires.
The bugles began to send their music out over the spider-web wilderness of the chaparral west of the spring, and Captain Moore declared, hopefully, that if Cal were anywhere in all that range he would be sure of hearing music before noon.
The trouble was that he was so many long, tiresome miles beyond the reach of the loudest bugle, and that he had heard music of an altogether different sort before the very earliest riser among them had opened his eyes.