“Oh, you are so beautiful!  Do you like me?”

“No, I don’t, I love you!” and he gathered her up with a hug, and then set her on his shoulder—­apparently nine feet from the floor.

She was at home.  She played with his long hair, and admired his big hands and his clothes and his carbine, and asked question after question, as fast as he could answer, until I excused them both for half an hour, in order to have a chance to finish my work.  Then I heard Cathy exclaiming over Soldier Boy; and he was worthy of her raptures, for he is a wonder of a horse, and has a reputation which is as shining as his own silken hide.

CHAPTER IV—­CATHY TO HER AUNT MERCEDES

Oh, it is wonderful here, aunty dear, just paradise!  Oh, if you could only see it! everything so wild and lovely; such grand plains, stretching such miles and miles and miles, all the most delicious velvety sand and sage-brush, and rabbits as big as a dog, and such tall and noble jackassful ears that that is what they name them by; and such vast mountains, and so rugged and craggy and lofty, with cloud-shawls wrapped around their shoulders, and looking so solemn and awful and satisfied; and the charming Indians, oh, how you would dote on them, aunty dear, and they would on you, too, and they would let you hold their babies, the way they do me, and they are the fattest, and brownest, and sweetest little things, and never cry, and wouldn’t if they had pins sticking in them, which they haven’t, because they are poor and can’t afford it; and the horses and mules and cattle and dogs—­hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, and not an animal that you can’t do what you please with, except uncle Thomas, but I don’t mind him, he’s lovely; and oh, if you could hear the bugles:  Too—­too—­too-too—­ too—­too, and so on—­perfectly beautiful!  Do you recognize that one?  It’s the first toots of the reveille; it goes, dear me, so early in the morning!—­then I and every other soldier on the whole place are up and out in a minute, except uncle Thomas, who is most unaccountably lazy, I don’t know why, but I have talked to him about it, and I reckon it will be better, now.  He hasn’t any faults much, and is charming and sweet, like Buffalo Bill, and Thunder-Bird, and Mammy Dorcas, and Soldier Boy, and Shekels, and Potter, and Sour-Mash, and—­well, they’re all that, just angels, as you may say.

The very first day I came, I don’t know how long ago it was, Buffalo Bill took me on Soldier Boy to Thunder-Bird’s camp, not the big one which is out on the plain, which is White Cloud’s, he took me to that one next day, but this one is four or five miles up in the hills and crags, where there is a great shut-in meadow, full of Indian lodges and dogs and squaws and everything that is interesting, and a brook of the clearest water running through it,