He woke up in the dark with the knife still betwixt his teeth and hurting all over. He didn’t know where he was. He could hear water trickling noisily over stones, so he reckoned he must be down a-near the crick, without that sound was his blood trickling over his bones. He could also hear two men jawing. They was discussing about some gold dust they just stole off of a man they killed. Mostly they was disappointed. It warn’t pay enough for all their trouble. The robber life was a hard life, they said. But they’d heard the blast and says maybe they should crawl up and see if anything blowed up that was worth hiving. They passed by only an arm’s length away from where Eeteh was hid in some bushes, too scared to breathe. His head was worth more’n what was carried in most miners’ scrotum bags of gold dust, and robbers don’t mind about taking heads off if there’s bounty money in it, even if heads was a generl vexation to tote around.
When they was gone, Eeteh slid along where they’d come from and struck a body. He could hear some wolves close by, prowling around, whining in their soft hungry way. He had to hurry not to become their supper. He was mostly naked, easy to see, easy to kill, so to cover himself up, he borrowed the dead man’s black pants and jacket. The hat was bonus and might fool people who he really was. I says it sure fooled me. The man’s boots was off and cut up and throwed away. Probably the robbers was looking for money hid in them. When the man fell, he’d fell on his kerosene lantern. Eeteh showed me the bullet holes in the back of the black jacket and how it was burnt in front, then he tossed everything into the darkness.
We et and drank and jawed on into the night round the candlelight. We felt comfortabler than since the days we was helping out old Zeb. I told him about the changes in the Gulch and everything that’d happened, and about Cap’n Patch and how he lost his head, and Eeteh told all about after he escaped from the robbers’ cave. He says at first he hid in an abandoned one-room log cabin in the hills up above the crick, but it turned out to be the hideout for a bandit gang, so, after a bad night scrouched down in awful pain behind a woodpile, he had to move on. Whilst hiding, he couldn’t send out hoots, but he heard mine sometimes, weak and far off. Then he didn’t hear me no more. He didn’t think we’d ever see each other again. He thought he was going to die.
I says I couldn’t send out hoots, because I had a lookout dogging me all day and all night. He says he knows about that, the Cheyenne braves who’d moved in with the tribe was watching him close, too. It was mainly why he run away when they all went off to war. He was afraid a the plans they had for him. He tried to tell them funny stories, but they didn’t have no sense a humor. And, last he seen, things warn’t going so good for Tongo neither. The others said he was a devilish and vengeful cretur. They wanted to kill him, but some judged he was a spirit horse and bad things might happen to them if they did. But they probably killed him anyways, Eeteh says. If Tongo got stubborn when they all rode west, he wouldn’t a give them no choice.
I’d made up my mind I warn’t going back to the Gulch. Nothing to go back for. So, we talked about Mexico. Eeteh says he heard tell them Mexicans warn’t exceeding friendly. I says as long as you ain’t got nothing to steal, they’re the most friendliest people I ever met. They sing and joke like that’s the common way a body talks, and they love whisky like everybody else, but they give you some if they got any extra. They’re clever with a knife, though, even when they’re drunk. You can’t take your eyes off of them. Eeteh says some a them is Indian bounty hunters, and I says that’s right, but he was just another Mexican now like the rest of them, warn’t he? No, he don’t speak their jabber, he says, and I says that, well, his tongue got cut out by the dang Apaches, didn’t it? And he laughed and rolled up his tongue and grunted, and I grunted back, and we both laughed together and took another swallow of the whisky.
Talk about Mexico drawed us back to the main hitch in our plans. We couldn’t go nowheres if I didn’t have a horse. Eeteh says he seen some wild ones close by where the tribe was camped before they went west, and they maybe didn’t take all their broke-in horses with them, so we could start there. Also there might be some food and blankets and other things left behind we could borrow for our travels.