The hero of the episode rode in the ambulance, sitting on the front seat, holding his carbine across his knees, and peering with sharp, far-sighted blue eyes over the alkali flats. Occasionally he took a shot at a jack rabbit and brought it down unfailingly, but the frontiersman has no relish for rabbit meat, and it was left where it dropped, for the crows. He also brought down a sparrow hawk wounded in the wing, and, having bound up the wound, offered it to Brewster, who took it as an opening to a conversation and tried to draw him out. "Barnwell tells me," he began, "that you have picked up a good deal of Apache." "Some Sierra Blanca, sir," said the soldier. It was respectful enough, and yet there was somewhere in the man's whole manner an air of equality, even superiority, that exasperated the lieutenant. It was contrary to good order and military discipline that a private should speak without hesitation, or without offence to the English tongue. Brewster resented it, and so the next thing he said was calculated to annoy. "He says you are quite one of them." "He is mistaken, sir." "Have you an Indian policy?" Cairness's eyes turned from a little ground owl on the top of a mound and looked him full in the face. "I really can't see, sir," he said, "how it can matter to any one." It did not in the least matter to Brewster, but he was one of those trying people whom Nature has deprived of the instinct for knowing when to stop. A very perceptible sneer twitched his lips. "You seem to be English," he said. "I am," announced the soldier. Now it is a hazardous undertaking to question an Englishman who does not care to be questioned. A person of good judgment would about as lief try to poke up a cross lion to play. But Brewster persisted, and asked if Cairness would be willing to live among the Apaches. "They have their good traits, sir," said the man, civilly, "and chief among them is that they mind their own business." It was impossible to misunderstand, and Brewster was vexed beyond the bounds of all wisdom. "The squaws have their good traits, too, I guess. I hear one had her nose cut off on your account." He should not have said it. He knew it, and he knew that the private knew it, but the man made no reply whatever. The remainder of the drive Cairness devoted to caring for the broken wing of the hawk, and, during halts, to sketching anything that presented itself,--the mules, the driver, passing Mexicans, or the cows trying to graze from ground where the alkali formed patches of white scum. He also accomplished a fine caricature of the lieutenant, and derived considerable silent amusement therefrom.