nging on our
trail, but they never attacked us; we was too strong for them.

"'Bout the last of September we reached Bent's Old Fort, on the
Arkansas, where the Santa Fe Trail crosses the river into New Mexico,
and we camped there the night we got to it.

"I know'd they had cows up to the fort; so just before we was ready for
supper, I took Paul and started to see if we couldn't get some milk for
our coffee. It wasn't far, and we was camped a few hundred yards from
the gate, just outside the wall. Well, we went into the kitchen, Paul
right alongside of me, and there I seen a white woman leaning over the
adobe hearth a cooking--they had always only been squaws before. She
naturally looked up to find out who was coming in, and when she seen the
kid, all at once she give a scream, dropped the dish-cloth she had
in her hand, made a break for Paul, throw'd her arms around him,
nigh upsetting me, and says, while she was a sobbing and taking on
dreadful,--

"'My boy! My boy! Then I hain't prayed and begged the good Lord all
these days and nights for nothing!' Then she kind o' choked again, while
Paul, he says, as he hung on to her,--

"'O mamma! O mamma! I know'd you'd come back! I know'd you'd come back!'

"Well, there, boys, I just walked out of that kitchen a heap faster
than I'd come into it, and shut the door. When I got outside, for a few
minutes I couldn't see nothing, I was worked up so. As soon as I come
to, I went through the gate down to camp as quick as my legs would carry
me, to tell Thorpe and Curtis that Paul had found his ma. They wanted to
know all about it, but I couldn't tell them nothing, I was so dumfounded
at the way things had turned out. We talked among ourselves a moment,
then reckoned it was the best to go up to the fort together, and ask the
woman how on earth she'd got shet of the Ingins what had took her off,
and how it come she was cooking there. We started out and when we got
into the kitchen, there was Paul and Mrs. Dale, and you never see no
people so happy. They was just as wild as a stampeded steer; she seemed
to have growed ten years younger than when I first went up there, and as
for Paul, he was in heaven for certain.

"First we had to tell her how we'd got the kid, and how we'd learned to
love him. All the time we was telling of it, and our scrimmages with
the Ingins, she was a crying and hugging Paul as if her heart was broke.
After we'd told all we know'd, we asked her to tell us