Juarez smiled with a flash of his strong, white teeth.
"Ah, Juanita, she too is well. Very pretty girl. Tall and very strong, but no more than that like an Indian. Her eyes are blue and hair black, and her skin it is not bad either. Juanita she likewise is a child. She sent her love and thanks to the three boys who rescued her. How is that for high?"
We laughed. His grafting of a slang phrase on his precise English was amusing.
"My mother love Juanita very much. She is much comfortable for her. I tell father and mother I stay for awhile on the farm, but by and by leave and go with Jim and Tom and Jo. Out in the mountains, over the plains, follow the trail once more. See?"
"Yes, perfectly, Juarez," I said.
"I tell my own people I cannot sleep under a roof. I die, no air. I cannot drive fat, slow horses to town. I cannot pitch hay into a wagon or dig up the potato from the ground. No, No! They understand. I have one letter for you all from father and mother."
He extracted it from the inside of his shirt where it was fastened. We read it, sitting on the top of our ship's cabin. It contained many messages of good will for us and of affection.
They said that they were perfectly reconciled to having their son Juarez traveling with us. That they realized that he could not be contented on a farm after having spent nearly all his life among the Indians. Also we must be sure to visit them before we returned East.
It was a good letter and we appreciated every word of it. We seemed united with the outside world once more, and we felt doubly fortified to have our tried comrade, Juarez, with us. There had been, as you remember, a natural friendship between Juarez and Jim. But now, Juarez accepted both Tom and me as comrades, something he had not done before, which we remembered, if you do not.
In appearance, Juarez was no longer the Indian, except for the lithe grace of his movements and his tireless endurance. There was also a certain dignity of reticence that he had derived from them. His dark hair was neatly cut and he wore a grey flannel shirt and blue trousers. The greatest change was in his eyes. They were of a mild brown and had lost that black fierceness of expression and sullen distrust that had haunted them when we had first met him on the captain's plateau, when his sister Juanita was still a captive in the power of Eagle Feather.