The chief Alchise and a half hundred of his kind--one so deaf that he
held to his savage old ear a civilized speaking-trumpet--squatted about
on the ground, and explained to Crook the nature of their wrongs.
"We were planting our own corn and melons," said Alchise, "and making
our own living. The agent at San Carlos never gave us any rations, but
we didn't mind about that. We were taking care of ourselves. One day the
agent--" He stopped and scowled at a squaw a few yards away, whose
papoose was crying lustily. The squaw, having her attention thus called
to the uproar of her offspring, drew from somewhere in the folds of her
dirty wrappings a nursing-bottle, and putting the nipple in its mouth,
hushed its cries. The chief went on: "One day the agent sent up and said
that we must give up our own country and our corn patches, and go down
there to the Agency to live. He sent Indian soldiers to seize our women
and children, and drive us down to the hot land."
He was a simple, sullen Apache, and his untutored mind could only grasp
effects. Causes were beyond it. He did not, therefore, understand that
coal had been discovered on his reservation, also silver, and that the
agent and the agent's friends were trying to possess themselves of the
land in order to dispose of it to the Eastern capitalist.
He knew that his cattle were driven off by the white cow-boys and could
not be gotten back, that he was given but one cup of flour every seven
days, that beef was so difficult to obtain that it practically formed no
part of his diet; but he did not know of the "boys" in Tucson and
officials in Washington who were profiting from the sale of Indian
supplies to white squatters.
He knew that the stores which should have gone to him were loaded upon
wagon-trains and hurried off the reservation in the dead of night; but
he did not know why the Apache who was sent to humbly ask the agent
about it was put in the guard-house for six months without trial. He
knew that his corn patches were trampled down, but not that it was to
force him to purchase supplies from the agent and his friends, or else
get out. He knew that his reservation--none too large, as it was, for
three thousand adults more or less--had been cut down without his
consent five different times, and that Mormon settlers were elbowing him
out of what space remained. But, being only a savage, it were foolish to
expect that he should have seen the reason for these things. He has not
yet learned to take kindly to financial dishonesty. Does he owe you two
bits, he will travel two hundred miles to pay it. He has still much to
absorb concerning civilization.
Another thing he could not quite fathom was why the religious dances he
had, in pursuance of his wild pleasure, seen fit to hold on Cibicu
Creek, had been interfered with by the troops. To be sure, the dances
had been devised by his medicine men to raise the dead chiefs and braves
with the end in view of re-peopling the world with Apaches and driving
out the Whites. But as the dead had not consented to the raising, it
might have been as well to allow the Indians to become convinced of the
futility of it in that way. However, the government thought otherwise,
and sent its troops.
Because they were sent, a fine officer had fallen victim to Apache
treachery of the meanest sort and to the gross stupidity of others, and
Arizona was on the verge of the worst disorder of all its disorderly
history. So Crook was sent for, and he came at once, and looked with his
small, piercing eyes, and listened with his ears so sharp to catch the
ring of untruth, and learned a pretty tale of what had gone on during
his absence on the troubled northern plains.
A great many delightful facts, illustrative of the rule of the
Anglo-Saxon in for gain, came to his knowledge. There were good men and
just in Arizona, and some of these composed the Federal Grand Jury,
which reported on the condition of affairs at the Agency. When a
territorial citizen had anything to say in favor of the Redskin, it
might be accepted as true. And these jurymen said that the happenings on
the San Carlos Agency had been a disgrace to the age and a foul blot
upon the national escutcheon. They waxed very wroth and scathing as they
dwelt upon how the agent's vast power made almost any crime possible.
There was no check upon his conduct, nor upon the wealth he could steal
from a blind government; and to him, and such as him, they attributed
the desolation and bloodshed which had dotted the plains with the graves
of murdered victims. It was the rather unavailing wail of the honest
citizen caught between the upper and nether millstones of the politician
and the hostile.
Crook had been recalled too late, and he knew it. Every Apache on the
reservation was ready for the war-path. It was not to be averted. One
man, even a very firm and deft one, could not straighten out in a few
weeks the muddle of ten years of thievery, oppression, and goading. It
takes more than just a promise, even though it is one likely to be kept,
to soothe the hurt feelings of savages who have seen eleven of their
friends jailed for fourteen months without the form of accusation or
trial. They feel bitter toward the government whose minions do those
things.
The new general was hailed by the territories as deliverer until he
found the truth and told it, after which they called him all manner of
hard names, for that is the sure reward of the seeker after fact. He
prepared for war, seeing how things were, but he tried for peace the
while. He sent to the bucks who lurked in the fastnesses and
strongholds, and said that he was going out alone to see them. He left
his troops and pack-train, and with two interpreters and two officers
repaired to the cañon of the Black River, where he scrambled and slid,
leading his scrambling, sliding mule down the precipices of basalt and
lava among the pines and junipers.
Bright, black eyes peered down from crevasses and branches. An Apache
lurked behind every boulder and trunk. But only the squaws and the
children and twenty-six bucks in war toilet, naked from shoulder to
waist, painted with blood and mescal, rings in their noses, and heads
caked thick with mud, came down to the conference.
It was not of much avail in the end, the conference. There was more than
one tribe to be pacified. The restlessness of the wild things, of the
goaded, and of the spring was in their blood.
The last straw was laid on when an Indian policeman arrested a young
buck for some small offence. The buck tried to run away, and would not
halt when he was told to. The chief of police fired and killed a squaw
by mistake; and though he was properly sorry for it, and expressed his
regret, the relatives and friends of the deceased squaw caught him a few
days later, and cutting off his head, kicked it round, as they had seen
the White-eye soldier do with his rubber foot-ball. Then they, aroused
and afraid too of punishment, fled from the reservation and began to
kill.
It was a halcyon time for the press. It approved and it disapproved,
while the troops went serenely on their way. It gave the government two
courses,--removal of the Apaches, one and all, to the Indian territory
(as feasible as driving the oxen of Geryon), or extermination--the
catchword of the non-combatant.
The government took neither course.
There was but one other resort. The exasperated, impotent press turned
to it. "If the emergency should arise, and it now looks as though it may
come soon," flowed the editorial ink, "enough resolute and courageous
men can be mustered in Tombstone, Globe, Tucson, and other towns and
settlements to settle the question, once and forever: to settle it as
such questions have often been settled before."
In pursuance of which the resolute and courageous men arose at the cry
of their bleeding land. They have gone down to history (to such history
as deigns to concern itself with the reclaiming of the plains of the
wilderness, in area an empire of itself) as the Tombstone Toughs.
The exceedingly small respectable element of Tombstone hailed their
departure with unmixed joy. They had but one wish,--that the Toughs
might meet the Apaches, and that each might rid the face of the desert
of the other. But the only Apaches left to meet were the old and feeble,
and the squaws and papooses left at San Carlos. The able-bodied bucks
were all in the field, as scouts or hostiles.
The resolute and courageous men, led by a resolute and courageous
saloon-keeper, found one old Indian living at peace upon his rancheria.
They fired at him and ran away. The women and children of the settlers
were left to bear the brunt of the anger of the Apaches. It was too much
for even the Tucson journalist. He turned from denunciation of the
military, for one moment, and applied his vigorous adjectives to the
Tombstone Toughs.
Arizona had its full share of murder and sudden death. But New Mexico
had more than that. Spring passed on there, with warmth for the
snow-wrapped mountains, and blistering heat for the dead plains, and her
way was marked with lifeless and mutilated forms.
Landor's troop was stationed at Stanton, high up among the hills. It had
come there from another post down in the southern part of the territory,
where anything above the hundreds is average temperature, and had struck
a blizzard on its march.
Once when Felipa got out of the ambulance to tramp beside it, in the
stinging snow whirls, and to start the thin blood in her veins, she had
looked up into his blanket-swathed face, and laughed. "I wonder if you
looked like that when you took me through this part of the world twenty
years ago," she said.
He did not answer, and she knew that he was annoyed. She had come to see
that he was always annoyed by such references, and she made them more
frequent for that very reason, half in perversity, half in a fixed
determination not to be ashamed of her origin, for she felt, without
quite realizing it, that to come to have shame and contempt for herself
would be to lose every hold upon life.
She was happier than she had been in Washington. Landor saw that, but he
refused to see that she was also better. However much a man may admire,
in the abstract, woman as a fine natural animal, unspoiled by social
pettiness, he does not fancy the thing in his wife. From the artistic
standpoint, a regal barbarian, unconfined, with her virtue and her vices
on a big scale, is very well; from the domestic, it is different. She is
more suitable in the garb of fashion, with homemade character of
parlor-ornament proportions.
Felipa had discarded, long since, the short skirt and moccasins of her
girlhood, and had displayed no inconsiderable aptitude in the matter of
fashions; but she was given to looseness of draperies and a carelessness
of attire in her own home that the picturesqueness of her beauty alone
only saved from slatternliness. There was one manifestation of ill taste
which she did not give, however, one common enough with the wives of
most of the officers. She was never to be found running about the post,
or sitting upon the porches, with her husband's cape around her
shoulders and his forage-cap over her eyes. Her instinct for the
becoming was unfailing. This was a satisfaction to Landor. But it was a
secret grievance that she was most contented when in her riding habit,
tearing foolhardily over the country.
Another grievance was the Ellton baby. Felipa adored it, and for no
reason that he could formulate, he did not wish her to. He wanted a
child of his own. Altogether he was not so easy to get on with as he had
been. She did not see why. Being altogether sweet-humored and cheerful
herself, she looked for sweet humor and cheerfulness in him, and was
more and more often disappointed. Not that he was ever once guilty of
even a quick burst of ill temper. It would have been a relief.
Sometimes when she was quite certain of being undisturbed, she took
Cairness's one letter from the desk, and read and reread it, and went
over every word and look she had had from him. She had forgotten
nothing, but though her olive skin would burn and then grow more
colorless than ever when she allowed herself to recall, not even a sigh
would come from between the lips that had grown a very little set.
Yet she not only loved Cairness as much as ever, but more. Her church
had the strong hold of superstition upon her, but she might have thrown
it off, grown reckless of enforced conventions, and have gone to him,
had not faithfulness and gratitude held her yet more powerfully.
Landor had been good to her. She would have gone through anything rather
than have hurt him. And yet it was always a relief now when he went
away. She was glad when he was ordered into the field at the beginning
of the spring. Of old she had been sufficiently sorry to have him go.
But of old she had not felt the bit galling.
Life went on very much the same at the post when there was only the
infantry left in possession. As there was nothing to do at any time,
there was nothing the less for that. On the principle that loneliness is
greatest in a crowd, Stanton was more isolated now than Grant had been
in the days when there had been no railroad west of Kansas. The railroad
was through the southwest now, but it was a hundred miles away. It was
unsafe to ride outside the reservation, there was no one for hops, the
only excitement was the daily addition to the list of slaughtered
settlers. Felipa spent most of her time with the Ellton baby. Miss
McLane had been married to Landor's second lieutenant for a year and a
half, and they were very happy. But Felipa in the knowledge of the
strength of her own love, which gained new might each time that she
wrestled with it and threw it back upon the solid ground of duty, found
their affection decidedly insipid. Like the majority of marital
attachments, it had no especial dignity. It was neither the steadfast
friendship she felt for her husband, nor the absolute devotion she would
have given Cairness.
But the baby was satisfactory. She amused it by the hour. For the rest,
being far from gregarious, and in no way given to spending all the
morning on some one else's front porch, and all the afternoon with some
one else upon her own, she drew on the post library and read, or else
sat and watched the mountains with their sharp, changing shadows by day,
and their Indian signal flashes by night,--which did not tend to enhance
the small degree of popularity she enjoyed among the post women.
Some thirty miles to the southeast was the Mescalero Indian Agency.
Landor had consented with the worst possible grace to take her there
sometime when the road should be passable and safe. She had openly
resented his disinclination, though she usually appeared not to notice
it. "It is very natural I should want to see the place where I was
born," she had said, "and I think we should both be more comfortable if
you would not persist in being so ashamed of it."
The story of her origin was an open secret now. Landor had never been
able to discover who had spread it. The probabilities were, however,
that it had been Brewster. He had been suspended for a year after
Landor's trial, and driven forth with contempt, but he was back again,
with a bold front, and insinuating and toadying himself into public
favor, destined by that Providence which sometimes arouses itself to
reward and punish before the sight of all men, to be short-lived.