All fell into silence again, save that the three Mexicans, nestling towards one another, ventured to converse in an undertone. The Apaches continued to imbibe and smoke their gleaming hatchet calumets. This dreary and onerous situation lasted for all of an hour after the hunter's parley with the red men, till they had finished their liquor and let their pipes die out.
The pale dawning light not merely appeared outside, but began to change the colour of the glow from the nearly exhausted lamps. At the same time the fresh morning air began battling with the fumes of spirits and tobacco.
Suddenly the similarly silent Indians on the exterior awoke. There were cautious signals exchanged; the horses, too, participated in the growing agitation, and shifted uneasily.
Two Apaches appeared at the doorway and gave an alarm to the chiefs, who had pricked up their cars, but only then deigned to rise at full length. They spoke together. All but two left the house, and almost instantly a figure draped in blankets was dragged over the sill. Flinging off the hands clutching her wrists with an indignant outburst which made the wraps to fall, the white men and the Mexicans beheld a graceful apparition unveiled.
It was quite a young girl for age, but being precocious, like all tropical creatures, a woman in development, she looked only too lovely in such a miserably unfit scene, fragile yet exuberant, with fine, tiny hands and feet, and narrow waist, black eyes, fair creamy skin and carnation lips; her very step seemed not to press the ground. In her ears and around her neck were pearls of unwonted dimensions; but it was evidently her character and her beauty which had won her the title of "La Perla Purísima."
At the same moment a distant fusillade was audible.
"Follow, and do as I do!" shouted Oliver, taking his decision with that swiftness of the prairie expert, which is, perhaps, the predominant trait that most bewilders the savages, trained to do no act without the warrant of magical manifestations.
With all possible speed he flung himself forward and dashed the Indian to the right of him as far aloof as the walls, at the same time throwing his left arm in a backhanded way around the Mexican señorita's waist so that, in drawing her forward, she was immediately pushed behind him.
