"Look!" said Red Wolf at the same instant. "Drop baby."
Not her pappoose, for it was safe under her blanket, but her three-year-old girl had slipped from behind her, and the river was sweeping it down stream.
"It will be drowned!" exclaimed Steve, in some excitement.
"No. Apache baby never sink. Swim a heap. Look!"
Steve looked, and there was no question but what the queer little thing was paddling bravely, and not even showing fear. To be sure, the current was carrying it away, but Steve now saw that three or four older boys and girls were swimming around it and were ready to give it all the help needed.
For all that, the wrath and anxiety of Too Many Toes exhibited itself in a torrent of long words.
Steve had learned among the Lipans that the red men have a great deal of fun in their compositions, but he was almost surprised to hear Red Wolf say, "Squaw talk big rain. Fall in river. Have freshet then. Lipans can't follow Apaches."
If talk could have raised the river, the chatter of nearly two hundred squaws of all ages, added to the scolding of Too Many Toes, would have made a torrent of it.
And yet a number of the squaws, wives and daughters of men of character and station attended to the business of fording the stream with the silence and gravity of the most dignified white matrons.
Dolores would have scorned putting herself on a level with such a squaw as Too Many Toes, even in the use of her tongue; and as for Ni-ha-be and Rita, they never forgot for a moment whose family they belonged to.