The scene was like one of Doré's most extravagant designs of abysses and
shadows. The gorge through which swept this silent flight and screaming
chase was not more than two hundred feet wide, while it was at least
fifteen hundred feet deep, with walls that were mainly sheer precipices.
As the fugitives broke into a trot, the pursuers quickened their pace to a
slow canter. No faster; they were too wise to rush within range of
riflemen who could neither be headed off nor flanked; and their hardy
mustangs were nearly at the last gasp with thirst and with the fatigue of
this tremendous journey. Four hundred yards apart the two parties emerged
from the sublime portal of the cañon and entered upon the little alluvial
plain.
To the left glittered the river; but the trail did not turn in that
direction; it led straight at the bluff in the elbow of the current. The
mules and horses followed it in a pack, guided by their acute scent toward
the nearest water, a still invisible brooklet which ran at the base of the
butte. Presently, while yet a mile from the stream, they were seized by a
mania. With a loud beastly cry they broke simultaneously into a run,
nostrils distended and quivering, eyes bloodshot and protruding, heads
thrust forward with fierce eagerness, ungovernably mad after water. There
was no checking the frantic stampede which from this moment thundered with
constantly increasing speed across the plain. No order; the stronger
jostled the weaker; loads were flung to the ground and scattered; the
riders could scarcely keep their seats. Spun out over a line of twenty
rods, the cavalcade was the image of senseless rout.
Of course Thurstane was furious at this seemingly fatal dispersion; and he
trumpeted forth angry shouts of "Steady there in front! Close up in the
rear!"
But before long he guessed the truth--water! "They will rally at the
drinking place," he thought. "Forward the mules!" he yelled. "Steady, you
men here! Hold in your horses. Keep in rear of the women. I'll shoot the
man who takes the lead."
But even Spanish bits could do no more than detain the horses a rod or two
behind the beasts of burden, and the whole panting, snorting mob continued
to rush over the loamy level with astonishing swiftness.
Meanwhile the leading Apaches, not now more than fifty in number, were
swept along by the same whirlwind of brute instinct. They diverged a
little from the trail; their object apparently was to overlap the train
and either head it off or divide it; but their beasts were too frantic to
be governed fully. Before long there were two lines of straggling flight,
running parallel with each other at a distance of perhaps one hundred
yards, and both storming toward the still unseen rivulet. A few arrows
were thrown; four or five unavailing shots were fired in return; the hiss
of shaft and _ping_ of ball crossed each other in air; but no serious and
effective fight commenced or could commence. Both parties, guided and
mastered by their lolling beasts, almost without conflict and almost
without looking at each other, converged helplessly toward a verdant,
shallow depression, through the centre of which loitered a clear streamlet
scarcely less calm than the heaven above. Next they were all together,
panting, plunging, splashing, drinking, mules and horses, white men and
red men, all with no other thought than to quench their thirst.
The Apaches, who had probably made their cruel journey without flasks,
seemed for the moment insatiable and utterly reckless. Many of them rolled
off their tottering ponies into the rivulet, and plunging down their heads
drank like beasts. There were a few minutes of the strangest peace that
ever was seen. It was in vain that two or three of the hardier or fiercer
Chiefs and braves shouted and gestured to their comrades, as if urging
them to commence the attack. Manga Colorada, absorbed by a thirst which
was more burning than revenge, did not at first see the slayer of his boy,
and when he did could not move toward him because of fevered mustangs, who
would not budge from their drinking, or who were staggering blind with
hunger. Thurstane, keeping his horse beside Clara's, watched the lean
figure and restless, irritable face of Delgadito, not ten yards distant.
Mrs. Stanley had halted helplessly so near an Apache boy that he might
have thrust her through with his lance had he not been solely intent upon
water.
It was fortunate for the emigrants that they had reached the stream a few
seconds the sooner. Their thirst was first satiated; and then men and
animals began to draw away from their enemies; for even the mules of white
men instinctively dread and detest the red warriors. This movement was
accelerated by Thurstane, Coronado, Texas Smith, and Sergeant Meyer
calling to one and another in English and Spanish, "This way! this way!"
There seemed to be a chance of massing the party and getting it to some
distance before the Indians could turn their thoughts to blood.
But the manoeuvre was only in part accomplished when battle commenced.
Little Sweeny, finding that his mule was being crowded by an Apache's
horse, uttered some indignant yelps. "Och, ye bloody naygur! Get away wid
yerself. Get over there where ye b'long."
This request not being heeded, he made a clumsy punch with his bayonet and
brought the blood. The warrior uttered a grunt of pain, cast a surprised
angry stare at the shaveling of a Paddy, and thrust with his lance. But he
was probably weak and faint; the weapon merely tore the uniform. Sweeny
instantly fired, and brought down another Apache, quite accidentally.
Then, banging his mule with his heels, he splashed up to Thurstane with
the explanation, "Liftinant, they're the same bloody naygurs. Wan av um
made a poke at me, Liftinant."
"Load your beece!" ordered Sergeant Meyer sternly, "und face the enemy."
By this time there was a fierce confusion of plungings and outcries. Then
came a hiss of arrows, followed instantaneously by the scream of a wounded
man, the report of several muskets, a pinging of balls, more yells of
wounded, and the splash of an Apache in the water. The little streamlet,
lately all crystal and sunshine, was now turbid and bloody. The giant
portals of the cañon, although more than a mile distant, sent back echoes
of the musketry. Another battle rendered more horrible the stark, eternal
horror of the desert.
"This way!" Thurstane continued to shout. "Forward, you women; up the hill
with you. Steady, men. Face the enemy. Don't throw away a shot. Steady
with the firing. Steady!"
The hostile parties were already thirty or forty yards apart; and the
emigrants, drawing loosely up the slope, were increasing the distance.
Manga Colorada spurred to the front of his people, shaking his lance and
yelling for a charge. Only half a dozen followed him; his horse fell
almost immediately under a rifle ball; one of the braves picked up the
chief and bore him away; the rest dispersed, prancing and curveting. The
opportunity for mingling with the emigrants and destroying them in a
series of single combats was lost.
Evidently the Apaches, and their mustangs still more, were unfit for
fight. The forty-eight hours of hunger and thirst, and the prodigious
burst of one hundred and twenty miles up and down rugged terraces, had
nearly exhausted their spirits as well as their strength, and left them
incapable of the furious activity necessary in a cavalry battle. The most
remarkable proof of their physical and moral debilitation was that in all
this mêlée not more than a dozen of them had discharged an arrow.
If they would not attack they must retreat, and that speedily. At fifty
yards' range, armed only with bows and spears, they were at the mercy of
riflemen and could stand only to be slaughtered. There was a hasty flight,
scurrying zigzag, right and left, rearing and plunging, spurring the last
caper out of their mustangs, the whole troop spreading widely, a hundred
marks and no good one. Nevertheless Texas Smith's miraculous aim brought
down first a warrior and then a horse.
By the time the Apaches were out of range the emigrants were well up the
slope of the hill which occupied the extreme elbow of the bend in the
river. It was a bluff or butte of limestone which innumerable years had
converted into marl, and for the most part into earth. A thin turf covered
it; here and there were thickets; more rarely trees. Presently some one
remarked that the sides were terraced. It was true; there were the narrow
flats of soil which had once been gardens; there too were the supporting
walls, more or less ruinous. Curious eyes now turned toward the seeming
mound on the summit, querying whether it might not be the remains of an
antique pueblo.
At this instant Clara uttered a cry of anxiety, "Where is Pepita?"
The girl was gone; a hasty looking about showed that; but whither? Alas!
the only solution to this enigma must be the horrible word, "Apaches." It
seemed the strangest thing conceivable; one moment with the party, and the
next vanished; one moment safe, and the next dead or doomed. Of course the
kidnapping must have been accomplished during the frenzied riot in the
stream, when the two bands were disentangling amid an uproar of plungings,
yells, and musket shots. The girl had probably been stunned by a blow, and
then either left to float down the brook or dragged off by some muscular
warrior.
There was a halt, an eager and prolonged lookout over the plain, a
scanning of the now distant Indians through field glasses. Then slowly and
sadly the train resumed its march and mounted to the summit of the butte.
Here, in this land of marvels, there was a new marvel. Incredible as the
thing seemed, so incredible that they had not at first believed their
eyes, they were at the base of the walls of a fortress. A confused,
general murmur broke forth of "Ruins! Pueblos! Casas Grandes! Casas de
Montezuma!"
The architecture, unlike that of Tegua, but similar to that of the ruins
of the Gila, was of adobes. Large cakes of mud, four or five feet long and
two feet thick, had been moulded in cases, dried in the sun, and laid in
regular courses to the height of twenty feet. Centuries (perhaps) of
exposure to weather had so cracked, guttered, and gnawed this destructible
material, that at a distance the pile looked not unlike the natural
monuments which fire and water have builded in this enchanted land, and
had therefore not been recognized by the travellers as human handiwork.
What they now saw was a rampart which ran along the brow of the bluff for
several hundred yards. Originally twenty feet high, it had been so
fissured by the rains and crumbled by the winds, that it resembled a
series of peaks united here and there in a plane surface. Some of the gaps
reached nearly to the ground, and through these it could be seen that the
wall was five feet across, a single adobe forming the entire thickness.
All along the base the dampness of the earth had eaten away the clay, so
that in many places the structure was tottering to its fall.
Filing to the left a few yards, the emigrants found a deep fissure through
which the animals stumbled one by one over mounds of crumbled adobes.
Thurstane, entering last, looked around him in wonder. He was inside a
quadrilateral enclosure, apparently four hundred yards in length by two
hundred and fifty in breadth, the walls throughout being the same mass of
adobe work, fissured, jagged, gray, solemn, and in their utter
solitariness sublime.
But this was not the whole ruin; the fortress had a citadel. In one corner
of the enclosure stood a tower-like structure, forty-five or fifty feet
square and thirty in altitude, surmounted on its outer angle by a smaller
tower, also four-sided, which rose some twelve or fourteen feet higher. It
was not isolated, but built into an angle of the outer rampart, so as to
form with it one solid mass of fortification. The material was adobe; but,
unlike the other ruins, it was in good condition; some species of roofing
had preserved the walls from guttering; not a crevice deformed their gray,
blank, dreary faces.
Instinctively and without need of command the emigrants had pushed on
toward this edifice. It was to be their fortress; in it and around it they
must fight for life against the Apaches; here, where a nameless people had
perished, they must conquer or perish also. Thurstane posted Kelly and one
of the Mexicans on the exterior wall to watch the movements of the savage
horde in the plain below. Then he followed the others to the deserted
citadel.
Two doorways, one on each of the faces which looked into the enclosure,
offered ingress. They were similar in size and shape, seven feet and a
half in height by four in breadth, and tapering toward the summit like the
portals of the temple-builders of Central America. Inside were solid mud
floors, strewn with gray dust and showing here and there a gleam of broken
pottery, the whole brooded over by obscurity. It was discoverable,
however, that the room within was of considerable height and size.
There was a hesitation about entering. It seemed as if the ghosts of the
nameless people forbade it. This had been the abode of men who perhaps
inhabited America before the coming of Columbus. Here possibly the
ancestors of Montezuma had stayed their migrations from the mounds of the
Ohio to the pyramids of Cholula and Tenochtitlan. Or here had lived the
Moquis, or the Zunians, or the Lagunas, before they sought refuge from the
red tribes of the north upon the buttes south of the Sierra del Carrizo.
Here at all events had once palpitated a civilization which was now a
ghost.
"This is to be our home for a little while," said Thurstane to Clara.
"Will you dismount? I will run in and turn out the snakes, if there are
any. Sergeant, keep your men and a few others ready to repel an attack.
Now, fellows, off with the packs."
Producing a couple of wax tapers, he lighted them, handed one to Coronado,
and led the way into the silent Casa de Montezuma. They were in a hall
about ten feet high, fifteen feet broad, and forty feet long, which
evidently ran across the whole front of the building. The walls were
hard-finished and adorned with etchings in vermilion of animals,
geometrical figures, and nondescript grotesques, all of the rudest design
and disposed without regard to order. A doorway led into a small central
room, and from that doorways opened into three more rooms, one on each
side.
The ceilings of all the rooms were supported by unhewn beams, five or six
inches thick, deeply inserted into the adobe walls. In the ceiling of the
rearmost hall (the one which had no direct outlet upon the enclosure) was
a trapdoor which offered the only access to the stories above. A rude but
solid ladder, consisting of two beams with steps chopped into them, was
still standing here. With a vague sense of intrusion, half expecting that
the old inhabitants would appear and order them away, Thurstane and
Coronado ascended. The second story resembled the first, and above was
another of the same pattern. Then came a nearly flat roof; and here they
found something remarkable. It was a solid sheathing or tiling, made of
slates of baked and glazed pottery, laid with great exactness, admirably
cemented and projecting well over the eaves. This it was which had enabled
the adobes beneath to endure for years, and perhaps for centuries, in
spite of the lapping of rains and the gnawing of winds.
On the outermost corner of the structure, overlooking the eddying, foaming
bend of the San Juan, rose the isolated tower. It contained a single room,
walled with hard-finish and profusely etched with figures in vermilion. No
furniture anywhere, nor utensils, nor relics, excepting bits of pottery,
precisely such as is made now by the Moquis, various in color, red, white,
grayish, and black, much of it painted inside as well as out, and all
adorned with diamond patterns and other geometrical outlines.
"I have seen Casas Grandes in other places," said Coronado, "but nothing
like this. This is the only one that I ever found entire. The others are
in ruins, the roofs fallen in, the beams charred, etc."
"This was not taken," decided the Lieutenant, after a tactical meditation.
"This must have been abandoned by its inhabitants. Pestilence, or
starvation, or migration."
"We can beat off all the Apaches in New Mexico," observed Coronado, with
something like cheerfulness.
"We can whip everything but our own stomachs," replied Thurstane.
"We have as much food as those devils."
"But water?" suggested the forethoughted West Pointer.
It was a horrible doubt, for if there was no water in the enclosure, they
were doomed to speedy and cruel death, unless they could beat the Indians
in the field and drive them away from the rivulet.