"You'll jess let me back out about now, chief," said Oregon Oliver, negligently. "If we cannot trade, we'll take the back paths apart from one another, and no bad blood."
He half turned as if to go away, but not without a glance of sympathy in bitterness at the certainly strange palanquin, draped with Navajo waterproof blankets, suspended elastically between two mules, now visible to him without.
But the wily redskin was evidently perplexed. The guides who have intimate relations with the United States army always are looked upon peculiarly by the Indians who have been thrashed by the blue cape coats. He detained the hunter by gently plucking at his blanket.
"The Ocelot bounds away too quickly," he observed, as if offended. "Has anger flamed up between us brothers?"
"Ne'er a flame," replied the other, who was far from seeking a quarrel just then and there, with such overpowering odds in his disfavour, "but when we can't trade, let's sleep on it; we'll see it sure 'nuff, how the _dicker_ promises."
"The white hunter has a stranger friend with him," remarked the Apache, with the abrupt change of conversation which is natural to men of no great conversational powers, and perhaps to let his interlocutor see that the previous subject was exhausted; "he is no hunter; I daresay he is a chief of many gold buttons."
He alluded to the quantity of eagle buttons which adorn the uniform of the United States officers, who, of course, dress up as if for parade, in "talks" with the savages.
"You are out thar', chief; he is no friend of mine, no military ossifer; only some traveller coming over the mountains to get into Greaser land."
"The Tiger Cat's eyes are sharp; he sees what goes on over the prairie and plains. Did not the hunter's ten-shoot gun (he could express only so many units by twice throwing up his extended hand) speak, and some mixed blooded dog bite the river bank?"
"It is so! I struck a _coup_ (French Canadian hunter word for a stroke of war, a blow). It's nothing to crow over; it's nothing to _cache_. When a mosquito stings, you slap, don't you? Same when a mestizo buzzes close; you can have his topknot as much as you like. But why," added he, repeating the other's phrase, "why does the Tiger Cat hanker after the Ocelot's dead?"