“I’ve got half a dozen other scars strung here and there about my body, the most of which was made by that lonely Apache chief that is called Lone Wolf; so I reckon you’ll conclude that he and me have some acquaintance.  Oh! we was as lovin’ as a couple of brothers!”

Mickey O’Rooney lifted his cap, and scratched his red head in a puzzled way, as if he were debating some weighty matter.  Suddenly looking up, he asked: 

“Was this Mr. Wolf born in these parts?”

“I can’t say, precisely, where he first seed the light, but it must have been somewhere round about this part of the world.  Why did you ax?”

“I was thinking p’raps he was born in Ireland, and came to this country when he was of tender age.  I once knowed a Mr. Fox, whose petaty patch was so close to ours, that the favorite amoosement of me respected parents was flingin’ the petaties over into our field by moonlight.  His name was Fox, I say, but I never knowed anybody by the name of Wolf.”

“He’s a screamer,” continued Sut Simpson, who seemed to enjoy talking of such a formidable foe.  “The Comanches and Apaches sling things loose in these parts, an’ the wonder to me is how you ever got this fur without losing your top-knots, for you’ve had to come right through their country.”

“We have had encounters with the red men times without number,” said Caleb Barnwell, who was standing erect, with arms folded, looking straight at the hunter.  He spoke in a deep, rich, bass voice, recalling the figures of the early Puritans, who were unappalled by the dangers of the ocean and forest, when the question of liberty of conscience was at stake.  “We have encountered the red men time and again,” he continued, “so that I may conclude that we have become acclimated, as they say, and understand the nature of the American Indian very well.”

Sut Simpson shook his head with a displeased expression.

“If you’d understood Injin nature, you’d never come here to settle.  You might have gone through the country on your way to some other place, for, when you’re on the way, you can keep a lookout for the varmints; but you’ve undertook to settle down right in the heart of the Apache country, and that’s what I call the biggest piece of tom-foolery that was ever knowed.”

This kind of talk might have discouraged ordinary people, but Barnwell and his companions had long since become accustomed to it.  They had learned to brave ridicule before leaving their homes, and they classed the expressions of the hunters who had called upon them with the utterances of those who failed to “look into the future.”

“We were not the dunces to suppose that this was a promised land, in which there were no giants to dispossess,” replied Barnwell, in the same dignified manner.  “Our fathers had to fight the Indians, and we are prepared to do the same.”

Sut Simpson had no patience with this sort of talk, and he threw up his head with an impatient gesture.