ter-courses. Nevertheless it was a
very good kind of country.

It had plenty of buffalo. The timber and the streams supplied winter
shelter. The wagon-road of the white merchants, between the Missouri
River and Santa Fe of New Mexico, ran through the middle of it and
furnished much plunder. In the south, where lay Comanche land and
Apache land, there were Mexican settlements that furnished horses.

With the Comanches and Apaches, and with the Cheyennes and Arapahos
north, the Kiowas were friends. To the Pawnees they were enemies, and
their name carried dread through many years of fighting.

Now in the summer of 1839, twenty Kiowa warriors left their village
near the Arkansas River in present southern Kansas, to go down across
Comanche country and get horses and mules from the Pasunke, or the
Mexicans of El Paso, which is on the Rio Grande River border between
northwestern Texas and Mexico. However, in those days all that region
was Mexico.

The head chief of the party was old Do-has-an, or Bluff. But he did
not command. Gua-da-lon-te, or Painted-red, was the war chief.
Dohasan would take command only in case Gua-da-lon-te was killed.
Among the warriors there were Dagoi, and Kon-a-te, whose name means
"Black-tripe."

After several days' travel horseback clear across New Mexico they came
to El Paso town, where many goods were stored on the way between New
Mexico and Old Mexico, and where the people got rich by trading and by
making wine from grapes. But they could see soldiers guarding El Paso;
so they did not dare to charge in and gather horses and mules from the
frightened Pasunke.

Dohasan, who was wise as well as brave, advised against it.

"Another time," he said. "We are too few, and we are a long way from
home. Let us go, and come again. Maybe on the way tip we will meet
with luck among the other villages."

They rested only the one night, and turned back, thinking that they had
not been discovered. At the end of a day's journey through a bad,
waterless land, they halted and camped by a spring, of which they knew.

It was a big rock-sink or round, deep basin, with, a pool of water at
the bottom, and a cave that extended under a shelf.

[Illustration: Young Kiowa girl (missing from book)]

The Mexican soldiers must have struck their trail, or perhaps had
followed them from El Paso; for early in the morning there was a sudden
shooting from all around, and much yelling. Bullets whined and
s