It is one thing to be sacrificed to a cause, even if it is only by
filling up the ditch that others may cross to victory; it is quite
another to be sacrificed in a cause, to die unavailingly without profit
or glory of any kind, to be even an obstacle thrown across the way. And
that was the end which looked Cabot in the face. He stood and considered
his horse where it lay in the white dust, with its bloodshot eyes turned
up to a sky that burned like a great blue flame. Its tongue, all black
and swollen, hung out upon the sand, its flanks were sunken, and its
forelegs limp.
Cabot was not an unmerciful man, but if he had had his sabre just then,
he would have dug and turned it in the useless carcass. He was beside
himself with fear; fear of the death which had come to the cow and the
calf whose chalk-white skeletons were at his feet, of the flat desert
and the low bare hills, miles upon miles away, rising a little above the
level, tawny and dry, giving no hope of shelter or streams or shade. He
had foreseen it all when the horse had stumbled in a snake hole, had
limped and struggled a few yards farther, and then, as he slipped to the
ground, had stood quite still, swaying from side to side, with its legs
wide apart, until it fell. He gritted his teeth so that the veins stood
out on his temples, and, going closer, jerked at the bridle and kicked
at its belly with the toe of his heavy boot, until the glassy eye
lighted with keener pain.
The column halted, and the lieutenant in command rode back. He, too,
looked down at the horse, pulling at his mustache with one gauntleted
hand. He had played with Cabot when they had been children together, in
that green land of peace and plenty which they called the East. They had
been schoolmates, and they had the same class sympathies even now,
though the barrier of rank was between them, and the dismounted man was
a private in Landor's own troop. Landor liked the private for the sake
of the old times and for the memory of a youth which had held a better
promise for both than manhood had fulfilled.
"Done up,--is it?" he said thoughtfully. His voice was hard because he
realized the full ugliness of it. He had seen the thing happen once
before.
Cabot did not answer. The gasping horse on the sand, moving its neck in
a weak attempt to get up, was answer enough. He stood with his hands
hanging helplessly, looking at it in wrath and desperation.
Landor took stock of the others. There had been five led horses
twenty-four hours before, when they had started on a hot trail after the
chief Cochise. But they had taken the places of five others that had
dropped in their tracks to feed the vultures that followed always,
flying above in the quivering blue. They were a sorry lot, the two score
that remained.
In the spring of '61, when the handful of frontier troops was pressed
with enemies red and brown and white, the cavalry was not well mounted.
Landor saw that his own horse was the best; and it bid very fair to play
out soon enough. But until it should do so, his course was plain. He
gathered his reins in his hands. "You can mount behind me, Cabot," he
said. The man shook his head. It was bad enough that he had come down
himself without bringing others down too. He tried to say so, but time
was too good a thing to be wasted in argument, where an order would
serve. There was a water hole to be reached somewhere to the southwest,
over beyond the soft, dun hills, and it had to be reached soon. Minutes
spelled death under that white hot sun. Landor changed from the friend
to the officer, and Cabot threw himself across the narrow haunches that
gave weakly under his weight.
It went well enough for a time, and the hills seemed coming a little
nearer, to be rougher on the surface. Then the double-loaded horse
fagged. Cabot felt that it did, and grasped hard on the burning cantle
as he made his resolve. When Landor used his spurs for the first time,
he loosed his hold and dropped to the ground.
Landor drew rein and turned upon him with oaths and a purpled face.
"What the devil are you trying to do now?" he said.
Cabot told him that he was preparing to remain where he was. His voice
was firm and his lips were set under the sun-bleached yellow of his
beard, but his face was gray, for all the tan. He lapsed into the speech
of other days. "No use, Jack," he said; "it's worse than
court-martial--what I've got to face here. Just leave me some water and
rations, and you go on."
Landor tried another way then, and leaned from his saddle in his
earnestness. He put it in the light of a favor to himself. But Cabot's
refusal was unanswerable. It was better one than two, he said, and no
horse in the command could carry double.
"I will try to reach the water hole. Leave a man there for me with a
horse. If I don't--" he forced a laugh as he looked up at the buzzard
which was dropping closer down above him.
"You could take turns riding behind the men."
"No," Cabot told him, "I couldn't--not without delaying you. The trail's
too hot for that. If you'll put a fourth and last bullet into Cochise,
the loss of a little thing like me won't matter much." He stopped short,
and his chin dropped, weakly, undecided.
"Jack," he said, going up and running his hand in and out underneath the
girths. He spoke almost too low to be heard, and the men who were
nearest rode a few feet away. "Jack, will you do something for me? Will
you--that is--there is a fellow named McDonald up at the Mescalero
Agency. He's got a little four-year-old girl he's taking care of." He
hurried along, looking away from Landor's puzzled face. "She's the
daughter of a half-breed Mescalero woman, who was killed by the
Mexicans. If I don't come out of all this, will you get her? Tell
McDonald I told you to. I'm her father."
He raised his eyes now, and they were appealing. "It's an awful lot to
ask of you, Jack, even for old sake's sake. I know that. But the little
thing is almost white, and I cared for her mother--in a way. I can't let
her go back to the tribe." His lips quivered and he bit at them
nervously. "I kept meaning to get her away somehow." There was a sort of
pity on Landor's face, pity and half contempt. He had heard that from
Cabot so often for so many years, "I kept meaning to do this thing or
the other, somehow, some day." "But it looks as though you might have to
do it now. Will you, lieutenant?" He tugged at the cinchings while he
waited.
Landor was without impulses; the very reverse from boyhood of the man on
the ground beside him, which was why, perhaps, it had come to be as it
was now. He considered before he replied. But having considered, he
answered that he would, and that he would do his best for the child
always. Once he had said it, he might be trusted beyond the shadow of a
doubt.
"Thank you," said Cabot, and drew his hand from the girths. He cut
Landor short when he tried to change him again. "You are losing time,"
he told him, "and if you stay here from now to next week it won't do any
good. I'll foot it to the water hole, if I can. Otherwise--" the feeble
laugh once more as his eyes shifted to where a big, gray prairie wolf
was going across the flat, stopping now and then to watch them, then
swinging on again.
They came around him and offered him their horses, dismounting even, and
forcing the reins into his hands. "You don't know what you are doing," a
corporal urged. "You'll never get out alive. If it ain't Indians, it'll
be thirst." Then he looked into Cabot's face and saw that he did know,
that he knew very well. And so they left him at last, with more of the
tepid alkali water than they well could spare from their canteens, with
two days' rations and an extra cartridge belt, and trotted on once more
across the plain.
He stood quite still and erect, looking after them, a dead light of
renunciation of life and hope in his eyes. They came in search of him
two days later and scoured the valley and the hills. But the last they
ever saw of him was then, following them, a tiny speck upon the desert,
making southwest in the direction of the water hole. The big wolf had
stopped again, and turned about, coming slowly after him, and two
buzzards circled above him, casting down on his path the flitting
shadows of their wings.
I
There was trouble at the San Carlos Agency, which was in no wise unusual
in itself, but was upon this occasion more than ever discouraging. There
had been a prospect of lasting peace, the noble Red-man was settling
down in his filthy rancheria to become a good citizen, because he was
tagged with little metal numbers, and was watched unceasingly, and
forbidden the manufacture of tizwin, or the raising of the dead with
dances, and was told that an appreciative government was prepared to
help him if he would only help himself.
Then some bull-teams going to Camp Apache had stopped over night at the
Agency. The teamsters had sold the bucks whiskey, and the bucks had
grown very drunk. The representatives of the two tribes which were
hereditary enemies, and which the special agent of an all-wise Interior
Department had, nevertheless, shut up within the confines of the same
reservation, therewith fell upon and slew each other, and the survivors
went upon the warpath--metal tags and all. So the troops had been called
out, and Landor's was at San Carlos.
Landor himself sat in his tent, upon his mess-chest, and by the light of
a candle wrote a despatch which was to go by courier the next morning.
Gila valley mosquitoes were singing around his head, a knot of
chattering squaws and naked children were peering into his tent, the air
was oven-hot, coyotes were filling the night with their weird bark, and
a papoose was bawling somewhere close by. Yet he would have been
sufficiently content could he have been let alone--the one plea of the
body military from all time. It was not to be. The declared and standing
foes of that body pushed their way through the squaws and children. He
knew them already. They were Stone of the Tucson press, sent down to
investigate and report, and Barnwell, an Agency high official, who would
gladly assist the misrepresentations, so far as in his power lay.
Landor knew that they were come to hear what he might have to say about
it, and he had decided to say, for once, just what he thought, which is
almost invariably unwise, and in this particular case proved exceedingly
so, as any one could have foretold. On the principle that a properly
conducted fist fight is opened by civilities, however, he mixed three
toddies in as many tin coffee cups.
They said "how," and drank. After which Stone asked what the military
were going to do about certain things which he specified, and implied
the inability of the military to do anything for any one. Landor smiled
indolently and said "Quien sabe?" Stone wished to be told if any one
ever did know and suggested, acridly, that if the by-word of the Mexican
were poco-tiempo, that of the troops was certainly quien-sabe? Between
the two the citizen got small satisfaction.
"I don't know," objected Landor; "you get the satisfaction of beginning
the row pretty generally--as you did this time--and of saying what you
think about us in unmistakable language after we have tried to put
things straight for you."
Stone considered his dignity as a representative of the press, and
decided that he would not be treated with levity. He would resent the
attitude of the soldiery; but in his resentment he passed the bounds of
courtesy altogether, forgetting whose toddy he had just drunk, and
beneath whose tent pole he was seated. He said rude things about the
military,--that it was pampered and inefficient and gold laced, and that
it thought its mission upon earth fulfilled when it sat back and drew
princely pay.
Landor recalled the twenty years of all winter campaigns, dry camps,
forced marches, short rations, and long vigils and other annoyances that
are not put down in the tactics, and smiled again, with a deep cynicism.
Barnwell sat silent. He sympathized with Stone because his interests lay
that way, but he was somewhat unfortunately placed between the military
devil and the political deep sea.
Stone was something of a power in Tucson politics, and altogether a
great man upon the territorial stump. He was proud of his oratory, and
launched into a display of it now, painting luridly the wrongs of the
citizen, who, it appeared, was a defenceless, honest, law-abiding child
of peace, yet passed his days in seeing his children slaughtered, his
wife tortured, his ranches laid waste, and himself shot down and
scalped.
Landor tried to interpose a suggestion that though the whole effect was
undoubtedly good and calculated to melt a heart of iron, the rhetoric
was muddled; but the reporter swept on; so he clasped his hands behind
his head and leaning back against a tent pole, yawned openly. Stone came
to an end at length, and had to mop his head with a very much bordered
handkerchief. The temperature was a little high for so much effort. He
met Landor's glance challengingly.
"Well done!" the officer commended. "But considering how it has heated
you, you ought to have saved it for some one upon whom it would have had
its effect--some one who wasn't round at the time of the Aravaypa Cañon
business, for instance."
The Agency man thought a question would not commit him. He had not been
round at that time, and he asked for information. The lieutenant gave it
to him.
"It was a little spree they had here in '71. Some Tucson citizens and
Papago Indians and Greasers undertook to avenge their wrongs and show
the troops how it ought to be done. So they went to Aravaypa Cañon,
where a lot of peaceable Indians were cutting hay, and surprised them
one day at sunrise, and killed a hundred and twenty-five of them--mostly
women and children."
The reporter interposed that it was the act of men maddened by grief and
their losses.
"I dare say," Landor agreed; "it is certainly more charitable to
suppose that men who hacked up the bodies of babies, and abused women,
and made away with every sort of loot, from a blanket to a string of
beads, were mad. It was creditably thorough for madmen, though. And it
was the starting-point of all the trouble that it took Crook two years
to straighten out."
Stone held that the affair had been grossly exaggerated, and that the
proof thereof lay in the acquittal of all accused of the crime, by a
jury of their peers; and Landor said that the sooner that highly
discreditable travesty on justice was forgotten, the better for the good
fame of the territory. The press representative waxed eloquent once
more, until his neck grew violet with suppressed wrath, which sputtered
out now and then in profanity. The officer met his finest flights with
cold ridicule, and the Agency man improved the opportunity by pouring
himself a drink from the flask on the cot. In little it was the
reproduction of the whole situation on the frontier--and the politician
profited.
In those days some strange things happened at agencies. Toilet sets were
furnished to the Apache, who has about as much use for toilet sets as
the Greenlander has for cotton prints, and who would probably have used
them for targets if he had ever gotten them--which he did not. Upon the
table of a certain agent (and he was an honest man, let it be noted, for
the thing was rare) there lay for some time a large rock, which he had
labelled with delicate humor "sample of sugar furnished to this agency
under--" but the name doesn't matter now. It was close on a quarter of
a century ago, and no doubt it is all changed since then. By the same
working out, a schoolhouse built of sun-baked mud, to serve as a temple
of learning for the Red-man, cost the government forty thousand dollars.
The Apache children who sat within it could have acquired another of the
valuable lessons of Ojo-blanco from the contractors.
Beef was furnished the Indians on the hoof and calculated by the pound,
and the weight of some of those long-horn steers, once they got upon the
Agency scales, would have done credit to a mastodon. By this method the
Indian got the number of pounds of meat he was entitled to _per capita_,
and there was some left over that the agent might dispose of to his
friends. As for the heavy-weight steers, when the Apache received them,
he tortured them to death with his customary ingenuity. It made the meat
tender; and he was an epicure in his way. The situation in the
territory, whichever way you looked at it, was not hopeful.
When the moon rose, Barnwell and Stone went away and left Landor again
with the peeping squaws and the wailing papooses, the mosquitoes and the
legacy of their enduring enmity,--an enmity not to be lightly despised,
for it could be as annoying and far more serious than the stings of the
river-bottom mosquitoes. As they walked across the gleaming dust, their
bodies throwing long black shadows, two naked Indian boys followed them,
creeping forward unperceived, dropping on the ground now and then, and
wriggling along like snakes. They were practising for the future.