Profoundly distrustful, though no weapons were visible, both parties fully aware of the rascality of either, the Apaches nevertheless recognised that the pair of fugitives who had slain their chief after beating the Rustlers in the barroom, and were speeding away on re-stolen horses, were no friends of the Mexicans. The proposal, therefore, that the two forces should unite in their mutual hate for the strangers, by whose deeds both suffered, was congenial. Always repulsed when they attacked the fortified houses of the rich farmers, the Indians hoped for better results if they were aided by men accustomed to fight on foot and to manage a siege.
Consequently, not ten minutes of explanation had passed before the half dozen principals were seated in a circle in the centre of the clearing before the smoking ruins of Tío Camote's luckless hostelry, with the calumet circulating for a council.
One little detail had been promptly debated and settled; apart from the bloodshed due to Mr. Gladsden and his hunter guide, five of the Apaches had been slain by Mexican bullets, while only three of the bandits had lost their lives in the skirmish. Now, inasmuch as the code "a life for a life," rules the savage practice, the Rustlers owed two lives to the Apaches, who could not, with a debt of blood unpaid, enter into alliance with the debtors.
With a sharklike grin, the worthy Captain Pedrillo removed this difficulty.
"There are four of my men, Chief Iron Shirt," said he, leaning towards the successor of Tiger Cat, "rank weeds, unruly, who have secreted unfair shares of plunder, and who contemplate desertion to go to Ures, and, perhaps, betray me and their valiant comrades to the police. I will arrange, on our march, to send them away as a detached scouting party, and your young men may take and wear their scalps at their girdles. Four scalps for two lives! Applaud my generosity!"
"It is a bargain," said the Apaches, grimly enjoying the joke.
Iron Shirt was a notorious villain, having twice at least mingled with the Cheyennes and passed himself off for one of them in order to obtain from the United States agent arms and ammunition which he meant, even as he received them with protestations of lip service, to essay upon the very official who gave them. Hence he was the man particularly to appreciate double-dealing and applaud it when he was not the dupe. He derived his singular but veritable appellation--for he is like other characters in our narrative, a figure in border annals--not from his ever wearing a shirt of mail, but from his good fortune in escaping body wounds. He attributed it to his "medicine," but the white hunters thought him very dexterous in the use of the small shield which Indian cavalry carry, and which, while not defying a rifle ball, will fend off an arrow and stop a revolver bullet.