"I knew it," cried the cacique triumphantly again, "I knew how it would be. The Lava Beds are yonder, and the Navajos are going for them; they have been making a big circuit to throw the Mexicans off the track, but now they have turned for the Beds again. They meant to go there all along. Oh, didn't I know it? Eh, Sooshiuamo?"
Sooshiuamo readily admitted the accuracy with which the Pueblo had grasped the intentions of the Navajos, and praised his skill. Presently they came to a place where the party they were pursuing had halted for a rest and a meal, and here the question as to who they were was decided beyond all doubt. Among the many moccasin-tracks which ran all about the little fire they had made, the keen eyes of the Indians detected the print of a shoe with a heel, the small, dainty shoe of a civilised woman.
"Look," said Miguel, who found it first, pointing it out to Stephens, who, keen-sighted though he was, barely distinguished it in the dry, sandy soil, "there is the foot of the señorita. Look how she is tired and stiff with riding, and walks with little steps. And here is where she lay down on a blanket to rest. Oh, she will be very tired."
Literally, these Indians seemed able to tell every single thing she had done in that camp during the half-hour or hour that had probably been spent there. It was a camp made late in the afternoon of the day before, so they settled. "Just when we were at the horse herd in the Valle Lindito," said the cacique, who seemed to read the signs left by the different members of the band and by their horses with as much ease and confidence as Stephens would have shown in gathering the meaning of a page of a printed book by glancing his eyes over the hundreds of little black crooked marks on the page, known to civilised beings as letters. But in the art of reading signs the cacique was a past master, where Stephens, to follow up the simile, had but just mastered the alphabet and was struggling with words of one syllable.
Forward once more on the trail, with the increased ardour given by the certainty that now there could be no mistake. As they drew near the Lava Beds, and the shades of evening began to fall, the cacique grew anxious.