The Apaches, like other Indians, know very little about cookery. They can roast meat and broil it, after a fashion, and they have several ways of cooking fish. They know how to boil when they are rich enough to have kettles, and they can make a miserable kind of corn-bread with Indian corn, dried or parched and pounded fine.
The one strong point in the character of Dolores, so far as the good opinion of old Many Bears went, was that she was the best cook in his band. She had not quite forgotten some things of that kind that she had learned before she became a squaw. Nobody else, therefore, was permitted to cook supper for the hungry chief. It was a source of many jealousies among his other squaws, but then he was almost always hungry, and none of them knew how to cook as she did.
She was proud of it too, and neither Ni-ha-be nor her adopted sister dreamed of disputing with her after she had uttered the word "supper."
They hurried out of the lodge, therefore, and Dolores was left alone.
She had no fire to kindle. That would be lighted in the open air by other female members of the family.
There were no pots and saucepans to be washed, although the one round, shallow, sheet-iron "fryer," such as soldiers sometimes use in camp, which she dragged from under a buffalo-skin in the corner, would have been none the worse for a little scrubbing.
She brought it out, and then she dropped it and sat down to take another look at that wonderful "talking leaf."
"What made me kneel down and shut my eyes? I could remember then. It is all gone now. It went away as soon as I got up again."
She folded the leaf carefully, and hid it in the folds of her deer-skin dress, but she was evidently a good deal puzzled.
"Maria Santisima--yes, I do remember that. It will all come back to me by-and-by. No! I don't want it to. It makes me afraid. I will cook supper, and forget all about it."
A Mexican woman of the lower class, unable to read, ignorant of almost everything but a little plain cookery, has less to forget than have most American children of six years old. But why should it frighten her, if the little she knew and had lost began to come back to her mind?
She did not stop to answer any such questions as that, but poured some pounded corn, a coarse uneven meal, into a battered tin pan. To this was added a little salt, some water was stirred in until a thick paste was made, and then the best cook of the Apaches was ready to carry her batter to the fire. Envious black eyes watched her while she heated her saucepan on the coals she raked out. Then she melted a carefully measured piece of buffalo tallow, and began to fry for her husband and master the cakes no other of his squaws could so well prepare.