Stephens determined to try to run a bluff.
"They're coming," said he confidently. "Don't you delude yourself. We've got force enough to take her back. You'd better surrender her quietly at once."
"Pooh!" answered Mahletonkwa tauntingly, "you've got no soldiers. The storekeeper burnt the letter you sent to the general, I know."
This was a blow to Stephens, and the moment he heard the Indian say it, he recognised the probability of its truth. Backus must have played traitor, and, what was more, he must have told the Navajos that he had done so. This Indian could never have invented such a story himself.
"Suppose he did," returned Stephens, determined to keep up his bluff; "that doesn't prevent me meeting Captain Pfeiffer and a troop of cavalry on the road and bringing them along." He raised his voice so that all those Indians who were within earshot might hear him. "If you dare hurt one hair of the senorita's head, you will every one of you be shot or hanged. You mark me."
While he was speaking the Navajo who had fired at him twice already put up his head for a third shot, but he bobbed it down quicker than before as the ready Winchester came up to the American's cheek.
The prospector lowered his piece once more instead of letting fly; he was determined not to throw away his first shot. He had plenty of cartridges, but he knew that to risk beginning with a miss would only embolden his enemies, and he meant to strike terror from the start.
The red Indian is as brave as the next man, but he objects to getting killed if he can help it, and he will carefully avoid exposing himself to the aim of a dead-shot. These Navajos had all seen Stephens drive the nail.
Stephens's verbal threat, however, only provoked Mahletonkwa's derision.
"Pooh!" he retorted jeeringly, "where are your friends now? It is getting time for them to come and save you. You'll see, though, they can't do it. We'll show you what we are. We are Tinne; we are men." The word Tinne means "men" in the Navajo language. They call themselves "the men" _par excellence_.
"Chin-music's cheap," rejoined Stephens, taunting him back. "Say, have you forgotten your time on the Pecos at Bosque Redondo already? You felt like 'men' there, didn't you, when you were grubbing for roots and catching grasshoppers and lizards to eat like a lot of dirty Diggers?"
"Hah!" replied the Indian indignantly, "I never saw Bosque Redondo. All the soldiers you could get couldn't take me where I didn't choose to go.
I don't take orders from any agent or any general. Nobody ever commands me." There spoke the soul of the true son of the desert. Personal liberty was to him as the breath of his nostrils. Nevertheless, beneath his boastful assertions Stephens thought he detected an undertone that might indicate a willingness to treat, and he slightly altered his own tone.
"Mahletonkwa, you're playing the fool. Why don't you bring the girl back quietly?"
"Well, if you want her," answered the Navajo, "why don't you come out of your hole and talk business?"
"Yes, and get shot by treachery for my pains!" answered Stephens indignantly. "I haven't attacked you. Your men began; they've shot at me twice without warning."
"Well," said the Navajo, "you tell your men, if you have any, that they are not to shoot, and I'll tell mine not to shoot, and then you and I can talk together. I'm willing to treat."
An idea struck Stephens; he had already insinuated that he had Captain Pfeiffer--a name of terror to the Navajoes and Apaches--at his back; he would keep up that pretence, at least for a time. He turned and shouted aloud in English at the pitch of his voice, "O Captain Pfeiffer! O Captain Pfeiffer! Keep your soldiers back. Don't let them fire a shot."
He paused, and then continued shouting again, but this time in Spanish, "O Captain of the Indian scouts," he would not give away the Santiago cacique in any wise by calling him by name, "let your scouts keep their posts and watch, but let them not fire a shot. Let them wait till I return. Peace talk."
The four Pueblo Indians heard him, and understood, and from their hiding-places they shouted back in assent.
"You see," cried he to his wily foe, "my men are warned. Do you send your men back to your camp, and come out and meet me in the open, eye to eye."
"No treachery?" said the Indian.
"No treachery," answered the white man.
The Navajo called to his companions, and presently Stephens had glimpses here and there of stealthy forms slinking through the Lava Beds back in the direction of the oasis where their horses were grazing.
"Now you come out," called Mahletonkwa to the American.
"Come forward then, you, too," said Stephens.
"You first," returned the savage.
Stephens decided to take the risk and set the example. Grasping his rifle in his left hand, he held it across his body, while he raised his open right hand above his head in sign of amity, as he rose to his full height. Not twenty yards away, across the ridge of rock that had covered him on his right hand, he caught sight of Mahletonkwa's copper-coloured visage, with the watchful dark eyes fastened on him, as they peered through a loophole-like fissure in the lava, where he was crouching.
Stephens, his head a little thrown back, his breast expanded, braced himself to receive, and to return if he could, the treacherous bullet he more than half expected.
"Stand up there you, Mahletonkwa, like me." He spoke proudly. "Be a man; stand up."
Very watchfully, both hands grasping his gun at the ready, the Indian rose to his feet. He looked like a fierce, cunning wolf hesitating whether to snap or to turn tail.
With right hand still extended, Stephens moved step by step towards his enemy, Faro keeping close to his heels. Not for a moment did the white man remove his eye from the Indian, alert to detect the first motion towards raising the gun, as he felt for his footing on the rough lava blocks, careful not to look down lest an unfair advantage should be taken of him. At five yards off he halted. The fissured rock behind which Mahletonkwa had been crouching was now all that separated them.
"Is there not peace between us?" exclaimed Stephens. "What do you fear?
Why does your gun point my way?"
"Is not your gun in your hand, too?" returned the Indian. "Put it down and I will put mine down."
Stephens lowered his right hand, and bending his knees slowly he sank his body near enough to the ground to lay his Winchester at his feet, but he never took his eyes off the Indian, and his fingers still encircled the barrel and the small part of the stock.
"Down with yours too, Mahletonkwa," he said quietly.
The Indian placed his piece at his feet, hesitated a moment, and then removed his hands from it and sat up, resting himself on his heels.
Stephens likewise took his hands from his weapon and sat on a rock.
Mutual confidence had advanced so far, although each was still intensely suspicious of the other.
"Now, tell me," said Stephens, "what did you carry off the girl for?"
"To get our pay for our dead brother," returned the red man.
"You did wrong then. You should have complained to the agent at Fort Defiance if you thought you had a claim to compensation. You should not have done an act of war by carrying her off."
"Huh! Was it not you who tried to send for the soldiers when we came to claim compensation?"
"Certainly I sent for them. You refused a reasonable offer, and you threatened to kill my Mexican friends instead. That was why I sent for them."
"It was you who caused the Mexicans to refuse compensation. They would have paid up and settled with us if it had not been for you."
"No, not so. It was you who asked a ridiculous price. I urged Nepomuceno Sanchez to make terms with you. But not at your price. You asked for the dead man's weight in silver, pretty near. I don't believe you know how much a thousand dollars is; I don't believe you could count it."
"Yes I could," said the Indian sulkily; "it's a back-load for a man to carry a day's journey."
Stephens figured on the weight, as stated by the Indian, for a moment.
"Well, I've got to admit you do seem to know something about it, after all," he answered; "your figures come out about right. And, as I said before, it was a perfectly absurd amount to ask. And then, to make it worse, instead of trying to make terms, you commit an outrage of this kind by carrying off an innocent girl by violence."
"She has not been ill-treated," said the Indian; "she has not been subject to violence while we have had her. We have taken good care of her." He spoke very earnestly and with marked emphasis.
"That's your story," returned Stephens; "I only hope it's true. It'll be better for you if it is. But anyways there's no denying the fact that she's been brutally dragged from her home."
"That's nothing much," said the Indian briefly; "she's not been ill-treated"; and he explained clearly enough what he meant by ill-treatment. Stephens understood him, and shuddered to think of that poor girl having lain for two days and nights completely at the mercy of this savage. But he remembered Madam Whailahay, and the cacique's wonderful account of the power of that superstition over the Tinne. It might prove to be true, as Mahletonkwa asserted, that the captive had been spared the worst. And the Navajo really did seem to have a notion of coming to terms. But on what basis were they to deal? How far could they trust each other? That was the crucial question.
"Look here now, Mahletonkwa," said he, "you take me straight to where she is, and let me talk to her quietly; and you give me your solemn promise that you won't try to make me prisoner, but will let me return to my own men unharmed, and I'll see what I can do to make peace for you." He had a special object in making this speech; it was to test the truth of the Indian's words. If the Navajo refused the permission for him to see her, he would be discrediting his own assertion that the girl was not seriously harmed; moreover, though Stephens had small faith in the Indian's honour, and was by no means unprepared to find that the promise, if given, was given only to entrap him, he nevertheless thought it politic thus to require it, that by making such a show of confidence on his own part in Mahletonkwa's honour he might beget a corresponding return of confidence from the other.