The Pages had been six weeks at the Hot Springs. The invalid, quite recovered, was able to join them in all their expeditions. The children had enjoyed every waking moment of their stay, and the sleeping moments also, it might be said, if one should judge of that by the soundness of their repose.

"Our vacation is nearly over," said Mr. Page one morning, looking up from a letter he had been reading.

"Oh, papa," cried Walter and his sister, "do we have to go home soon?"

"Pretty soon," was the reply. "This letter calls me home. Mr. Dillon has business in Arizona, and wants to start not later than the first of September."

Mr. Dillon was Mr. Page's partner. He had already postponed his departure beyond the time originally set. Mr. Page did not feel that he could ask him to do so again, and the elder members of the party were beginning to feel that home would be welcome.

Not so the children. Rugged with health, bubbling over with happiness, and almost as brown as the young Indians, they deplored the necessity of leaving a spot with which they had become thoroughly familiar, and whose strange, peculiar people they had learned to know and love. The Indians are slow to make friends among the whites, but their confidence once given, they do not soon withdraw it. Walter and Nellie had long since been initiated into the mysteries of herb gathering, fruit drying, blanket and basket weaving, rug making and beef jerking. They could talk quite intelligently on all these subjects.

That which interested them most, appealing strongly to their tender sympathies, was the subject of the removal of the Indians from the Springs.

"They talk of it everywhere we go," said the boy to his father one evening. "They are always asking us if we think perhaps the government will let them stay, papa, and what you think of it.

"We always tell them that it isn't the government that is putting them out, but they can't understand that. They say if the government can buy them or give them another home they might just as well let them stay. I think it is dreadful, dreadful for the people to drive them away."

"Yes, it is both sad and unjust, it seems to me," said their father; "but such has been the fate of the Indian ever since the white man landed on these shores. It has always been 'move on, move on'——"

"Till there isn't any more land to move to," interrupted Walter.

"There is going to be a Junta to-morrow or the day after," said Nellie. "The commissioners are coming to talk to them."

"A good many of them think they won't have to go, because Mr. Lummis is coming, papa," said Walter.

"That will not make any difference in one way," said their father, "though it may in another. Mr. Lummis is a true friend of the Indians. He will exert all his efforts to have them removed to a desirable place, where there will be plenty of water, fertile soil, and every other favorable condition."

"I heard a man say the other day to Captain Blacktooth that the Indians had not been here more than twenty-five years."

"And what did Cecilio answer?"

"He said, pointing to the graveyard: 'Look at our graves on the hillside. Some of those crosses crumble like ashes. Touch one, it falls to pieces in your hand. And yet there are crosses there fifty years old that have not begun to crumble or fall.'"

"What did the man say to that argument?"

"He said wood rotted very fast in this country."

"Which is not true," rejoined Mr. Page.

"Then Cecilio said, in the most scornful way: 'You can read in the reports of the lawsuit that one of the white commanders wrote more than fifty years ago that the Indians at Warner's Ranch were made to work by flogging them. Now you flog us no longer, but you do as bad, or worse. That was before I was born, yet you say we were not here twenty-five years back. You would better study the case first before you say such things.'"

"Then Cecilio went away," said Nellie, "and the man said he would like to flog him—Cecilio."

"It was funny about Francisco, then, papa," said Walter. "He was coming with a big bucket of water, and he stumbled over that man's foot and spilled a lot."

"Was the man angry?" asked his father, with a smile.

"Oh, very!"

"And Francisco?"

"He said, 'Oh, excuse me,' and went on. When I told him he was not always so awkward as that, he laughed and said: 'Sometimes I am awkward, Walter. Sometimes I have been, and perhaps I will be again,' And he never smiled, papa—just walked along with his eyes on the ground. I am sure he did it purposely."

"Yes, I think he did," said Mr. Page.

"But you don't think it was any harm, do you?" inquired Nellie.

"No, I don't," was the reply.

"I'd have emptied the whole bucket on his head if I had been an Indian," said Walter. "Those people are too patient."

"And so you would be, my son, if you had been hunted for five hundred years as they have been," said Mr. Page.

Early the next morning there was an unusual stir in the village. The Indians had donned their best clothes, and a general air of expectation pervaded everything. All eyes seemed to turn in the direction of the Cold Spring, from which it was expected the visitors would arrive. At last a carriage was seen approaching, and all the natives were out to meet it. After luncheon in the restaurant the people followed the commissioners to the schoolhouse, where Mr. Charles Lummis explained the case to them as clearly as it was possible to do. They listened in respectful silence, and then went slowly and silently away.

The next morning they reassembled.

"Have you thought about what was said yesterday?" asked one of the commissioners.

"Yes," came in a low murmur from the crowd.

"And what have you to say?"

"That we wish to stay here in our homes," answered Captain Cecilio.

"But that is impossible. You have been told that it cannot be. This land does not belong to you any more. The law has so decided it."

"If once it was ours, why not still? We have not sold it. We have not given it away; we have not left it. Why, then, is it not our own?"

"That has already been explained. You allowed the time to pass without presenting your claim until it was too late."

"But we did not know, and our old men did not know," cried Cecilio in a loud voice.

"The law takes no account of that."

"It is not just; we do not understand the law."

"Nor we, at all times. But it has been decided, and it cannot be changed. Think now of the outside country that you know, and make up your minds where you wish to go. The government will do what it is best for you."

"Let us go to the Great Father in Washington and plead with him—I and some of my people," requested Cecilio.

"It cannot be. It would be useless. There is only one thing to be done."

"And that thing we shall never do of our own free will," cried Cecilio, flinging out his arms and shaking his black locks in the face of the speaker.

Then began a loud talk in the CupeÑo language, for in this emergency the Spanish failed them. The white men waited quietly until the tumult had subsided, knowing that it was best to let them give vent to their feelings so long repressed. At length a fine-looking young woman stepped forward and, without the least embarrassment, offered to translate the answers of her people into the Spanish tongue.[G]

"We thank you for coming here to speak with us," she said, as courteously as any lady in the land.

"We thank you for coming here to talk with us in a way we can understand. It is the first time any one has done so. They have said, 'You must go, you must go,' but they have not told us, assembled together, why we must go. Some of our old people have never believed it till now, and some of us will not yet believe that it can happen.

"You ask us to think what place we like next best to this place, where we always have lived. You see that graveyard out there? There are our fathers and our grandfathers. You see that Eagle-nest Mountain, and that Rabbit-hole Mountain? When God made them he gave us this place. We have always been here; we do not care for any other place. It may be good, but it is not ours. We have always lived here, we would rather die here. Our fathers did; we cannot leave them. Our children were born here—how can we go away? If you give us the best place in the world it is not so good for us as this. The Captain he say his people cannot go anywhere else; they cannot live anywhere else. Here they always live; their people always live here. There is no other place. This is our home. We ask you to get it for us. The Indians always here. We stay here. Everybody knows this is Indian land. These Hot Springs always Indian. We cannot live anywhere else. We were born here, and our fathers are buried here. We do not think of any place after this. We want this place and not any other place."

"But if the government cannot buy this place for you, then what would you like next best?"

"There is no other place for us. We do not want you to buy any other place. If you will not buy this place we will go into the mountains like quail and die there, the old people and the women and children. Let the government be glad and proud. It can kill us. We do not fight; we do what it says. If we cannot live here we want to go into those mountains and die. We do not want any other home."

It was useless to parley with the poor CupeÑos. That they would receive the value and more than the value of their houses, that they would be given material to build other and better dwellings, that soil as fertile and water as abundant would be found for them, that they would be provided with new agricultural tools, that they would be transported free of charge to their new home—none of these things availed. To each and every argument they made the same reply:

"We want no other place, we want no new houses, or lands, or tools for farming. This is our home, here let us stay. Or, if you will not, let us go into the mountains and die."

It was very pathetic. Not only Walter and Nellie, but their father also, wiped away more than one sympathetic tear as, standing on the edge of the crowd, they listened to that soulful cry, nearly as old as the world:

"Here is our home, here let us stay. Die we can and will, but give up our homes we cannot."

The commissioners, unable to make any impression upon the Indians, soon departed, all of them deeply affected by the proceedings.

They had now nothing to do but continue their search for available lands, fearing it might yet come to pass that the Indians would have to be ejected by force from their homes.

In groups of two or three, the men together, the women and children following, but all composed, all silent, they went to their several dwellings. It had been a sorrowful day in Cupa; every hope raised by the expectation of meeting the commissioners had been dashed to the ground. Mr. Page and the children walked silently back to the camp, longing to exchange words of sympathy with these humble friends, yet respecting their silent grief too deeply to intrude upon it.

"Children, you will never forget this day," said their father. "Let it, then, always be a lesson to you, though it is not likely either of you will be called upon to decide the destiny of any nation, or part of a nation, however small. From his point of view, the present owner of Warner's Ranch has a perfect, undeniable right to occupy these lands, and so he has in the eyes of the law. He is not an unkindly man, I am told, nor is he a poor man. Yet it would seem that now he has neglected a grand opportunity for doing a generous action and gaining not only the gratitude of these poor people, but the admiration and respect of the whole country.

"However, it seems he cannot find it in his heart to allot them their beloved nine hundred acres out of his broad possessions, numbering thirty thousand. It has been said truly by the wisest lips that ever spoke: 'It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.'"