nt, was that she was the best cook in his
band. She had not quite forgotten some things of that kind that she
had learned before she became a squaw. Nobody else, therefore, was
permitted to cook supper for the hungry chief.

It was a source of many jealousies among his other squaws, but then he
was almost always hungry, and none of them knew how to cook as she did.

She was proud of it too, and neither Ni-ha-be nor her adopted sister
dreamed of disputing with her after she had uttered the word "supper."

They hurried out of the lodge, therefore, and Dolores was left alone.
She had no fire to kindle.

That would be lighted in the open air by other female members of the
family.

There were no pots and saucepans to be washed, although the one round,
shallow, sheet-iron "fryer," such as soldiers sometimes use in camp,
which she dragged from under a buffalo-skin in the corner, would have
been none the worse for a little scrubbing.

She brought it out, and then she dropped it and sat down to take
another look at that wonderful "talking leaf."

"What made me kneel down and shut my eyes? I could remember then. It
is all gone now. It went away as soon as I got up again."

She folded the leaf carefully, and hid it in the folds of her deer-skin
dress, but she was evidently a good deal puzzled.

"Maria Santissima--yes, I do remember that. It will all come back to
me by-and-by. No! I don't want it to. It makes me afraid. I will
cook supper and forget all about it."

A Mexican woman of the lower class, unable to read, ignorant of almost
everything but a little plain cookery, has less to forget than have
most American children of six years old. But why should it frighten
her if the little she knew and had lost began to come back to her mind?

She did not stop to answer any such questions as that, but poured some
pounded corn, a coarse, uneven meal, into a battered tin pan. To this
was added a little salt, some water was stirred in till a thick paste
was made, and then the best cook of the Apaches was ready to carry her
batter to the fire. Envious black eyes watched her while she heated
her saucepan on the coals she raked out. Then she melted a carefully
measured piece of buffalo tallow, and began to fry for her husband and
master the cakes no other of his squaws could so well prepare.

When the cakes were done brown, the same fryer and a little water would
serve to take the toughness out of some strips of dr