* * *
Taking the opportunity to rest while the scouts were out, Cha and the rest of his band enjoyed the shade of a grove of pepperwood laurel near a trickle of water. The chief of the Yokuts knelt holding a laurel branch over a small fire, the white meat of a rattler sizzling in its fork. As he removed it, his four scouts rode into camp, beaten and bruised.
He fingered some of the hot meat into his mouth, then handed the rest to another brave and walked over to the men who were helping the most injured brave from his mount.
“Leatherchests?” he asked, examining the man’s dislocated shoulder.
“No, cattle riders,” Mulul, another subchief and the leader of the scouts, answered.
“There must have been many.”
“No.” Mulul cut his eyes away from Cha’s inquisitive gaze. “Only two, but they surprised us, and the leather-that-captures pulled these two from the saddle.”
“Lie on the ground,” Cha instructed the injured man. Placing a foot in the man’s armpit, with both hands firmly on the man’s wrist, Cha jerked the arm and got the shoulder back into place. The man slumped, out cold without saying a word or uttering a moan.
Cha turned his attention back to his subchief. “This time, Mulul, do not be surprised. Take five men and go in search of these cattle riders. Do not allow them to reach the camp of the leatherchests.”
Mulul and his men left the wounded braves to mend by the trickle of water, and Cha and the rest of the band moved on at a lope. Cha intended to find horses and have them on the trail back to the Ton Tache before the sun found its resting place in the sea again.
Mulul and his men caught up with the main body of men before nightfall. “The cattle riders are too far ahead,” was all the subchief had to offer. The look he received from Cha told him what his chief thought of this information,
Cha waved Sahma up to ride beside him. “Work your way back and tell all the subchiefs to be on the lookout for the leatherchests. I have decided that we will settle for only a hundred horses. We must strike and return to the Ton Tache before the cattle riders have a chance to bring the leatherchests down upon us.”
They rode long into the night. By the time a glimmer of light came to the west and began to make the sister stars disappear, Cha and his band had reined up under wide-branched oaks whose limbs dripped with moss. They looked down to a distant flat at a group of Mexican buildings, and as father sun crept over the mountains to greet the day, Cha made out at least a hundred horses in the pasture between the buildings and the sea. The herd would have to be enough since they had lost the element of surprise. But finding them was not possessing them.
He divided his band into three groups, keeping only ten men, but four of these besides himself had the firesticks.
Sahma led one of the other groups, and Mulul led the third. As the other two groups made their way into ravines where they could pass unseen on either side of the buildings, Cha and his small band worked their way through an oak grove directly toward them.