CHAPTER THIRTY.
THE RAIDERS RETURNING.
An Indian bivouac.

It is upon a creek called "Pecan," a confluent of the Little Witchita river, which heads about a hundred miles from the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado.
There are no tents in the encampment; only here and there a blanket or buffalo robe extended horizontally upon upright poles--branches cut from the surrounding trees.

The umbrageous canopy of the pecans protects the encamped warriors from the fervid rays of a noonday sun, striking vertically down.
That they are on the maraud is evidenced by the absence of tents.

A peaceful party, in its ordinary nomadic passage across the prairies, would have lodges along with it--grand conical structures of painted buffalo skins--with squaws to set them up, and dogs or ponies to transport them when struck for another move.
In this encampment on the Pecan are neither squaws, dogs, nor ponies; only men, naked to the breech clout, their bodies brightly painted from hip to head, chequered like a hatchment, or the jacket of a stage harlequin, with its fantastic devices, some ludicrous, others grotesque; still others of aspect terrible--showing a death's-head and cross-bones.
A prairie man on seeing them would at once say, "Indians on the war trail!" It does not need prairie experience to tell they are returning upon it.
If there are no ponies or dogs beside them, there are other animals in abundance--horses, mules, and horned cattle.

Horses and mules of American breed, and cattle whose ancestral stock has come from Tennessee or Kentucky along with the early colonists of Texas.
And though there are no squaws or papooses in the encampment, there are women and children that are white.