"Maybe they won't tell."
"Burn some. The rest talk then. White man's leaves not want to tell about white man. Rita must make them talk. Old braves in camp say they know. Many times the talking leaves tell the pale-faces all about Indians. Tell where go. Tell what do. Tell how to find and kill. Bad medicine."
The "old braves" of many an Indian band have puzzled their heads over the white man's way of learning things and sending messages to a distance, and Red Wolf's ideas had nothing unusual in them. If the talking leaves could say anything at all, they could be made to tell a chief and his warriors the precise things they wanted to know.
Ni-ha-be's talk with her brother lasted until he pointed to the camp-fire, where Many Bears was resting after his first attack upon the results of Mother Dolores's cooking.
"Great chief eat. Good time talk to him. Go now."
There was no intentional lack of politeness in the sharp, overbearing tone of Red Wolf. It was only the ordinary manner of a warrior speaking to a squaw. It would therefore have been very absurd for Ni-ha-be to get out of temper about it; but her manner and the toss of her head as she turned away was decidedly wanting in the submissive meekness to be expected of her age and sex.
"It won't be long before I have a lodge of my own," she said, positively. "I'll have Rita come and live with me. Red Wolf shall not make her burn the talking leaves. Maybe she can make them talk to me. My eyes are better than hers. She's nothing but a pale-face, if she did get brought into my father's lodge."
A proud-spirited maiden was Ni-ha-be, and one who wanted a little more of "her own way" than she could have under the iron rule of her great father and the watchful eyes of Mother Dolores.
"I'll go to the bushes and see Rita. Our supper won't be ready yet for a good while."
It would be at least an hour, but Ni-ha-be had never seen a clock in her life, and knew nothing at all about "hours." There is no word for such a thing in the Apache language.