If you take even a good-humored puppy of a savage breed and tie him to a
kennel so that all his natural energy strikes in; if you feed him upon
raw meat, when you feed him at all, but half starve him for the most
part; and if you tantalize and goad him whenever you are in search of a
pastime, he is more than likely to become a dangerous beast when he
grows up. He is then a menace to the public, so you have but one course
left--to take him out and shoot him.
That is the proper way to bring up dogs. It makes them useful members of
society. And it applies equally well to Indians. It has worked
beautifully with them for several hundred years. In Canada they have run
it on another principle. But they have missed much of the fun we have
had out of it. In the territories there was plenty of such fun. And it
had pretty well reached its height in the spring of '83.
The Indians, being wicked, ungrateful, suspicious characters, doubted
the promises of the White-eyes. But it is only just to be charitable
toward their ignorance. They were children of the wilderness and of the
desert places, walking in darkness. Had the lights of the benefits of
civilization ever shone in upon them, they would have realized that the
government of these United States, down to its very least official
representative, never lies, never even evades.
"Have I ever lied to you?" Crook asked them.
And the deaf old chief Pedro answered for them: "No," he said, "when you
were here before, whenever you said a thing, we knew that it was true,
and we kept it in our minds. When you were here, we were content; but we
cannot understand why you went away. Why did you leave us? Everything
was all right when you were here."
He was but an unlearned and simple savage, and the workings of a War
Department were, of course, a mystery to him. He and his people should
have believed Crook. The thoughtful government which that much-harassed
general represented had done everything possible to instill sweet
trustfulness into their minds. But the Apache, as all reports have set
forth, is an uncertain quantity.
The quiet, observant, capable man, whose fate it was to be always called
in for the thankless task of undoing the evil work of others, made every
effort to pacify this time, but he failed.
"Yes, we believe you," said the Apache; "but you may go away again." So
he refused to be cajoled, and going upon the war-path, after much
bloodshed, fled into Mexico.
The general took a couple of hundred Indian scouts, enlisted for six
months' service, a troop of cavalry, and a half-dozen guides and
interpreters, and followed across the border.
There was a new treaty, just made to that end. It was the fiercest of
all the Apache tribes, the Chiricahuas, that had hidden itself in the
fastnesses of the Sierra Madre, two hundred miles south of the boundary
line. Geronimo and Juh and Chato, and other chiefs of quite as bloody
fame, were with him. To capture them would be very creditable success.
To fail to do so would entail dire consequences, international
complications perhaps, and of a certainty the scorn and abuse of all the
wise men who sat in judgment afar off.
The general kept his own counsel then, but afterward, when it was all
over, he confessed,--not to the rejoicing reporter who was making
columns out of him for the papers of this, and even of many another,
land,--but to the friends who had in some measure understood and
believed in him, that the strain and responsibility had all but worn him
out. And he was no frail man, this mighty hunter of the plains.
The general of romance is a dashing creature, who wears gold lace and
has stars upon his shoulder straps, and rides a fiery charger at the
head of his troops. He always sits upon the charger, a field-glass in
his hand and waiting aides upon every side, or flourishes a sword as he
plunges into the thick of the battle smoke.
But Crook was not dashing, only quiet and steady, and sure as death.
Upon parade and occasions of ceremony he wore the gold lace and the
stars. To do his life's work he put on an old flannel shirt, tied a
kerchief around his neck, and set a pith helmet over those farseeing,
keen little eyes. He might have been a prospector, or a cow-boy, for
all the outward seeming of it. His charger was oftenest a little
government mule, and he walked, leading it over many and many a trail
that even its sure feet could not trust.
There were plenty such trails in the Sierra Madre, through which the
Apache scouts were guiding him to their hostile brothers. Cairness had
come along with his own band of scouts. He had seen rough work in his
time, but none equal to this. Eight mules stepped a hand's breadth from
the path, and lay hundreds of feet below at the base of the precipice,
their backs broken under their aparejos. The boots were torn from the
men's feet, their hands were cut with sharp rocks. They marched by night
sometimes, sometimes by day, always to the limit of their strength. And
upon the fourteenth morning they came upon the Chiricahua stronghold.
Without the scouts they could never have found it. The Indian has
betrayed the Indian from first to last.
It was a little pocket, a natural fortress, high up on a commanding
peak. Cairness crept forward flat along the rocks, raised his head
cautiously and looked down. There in the sunrise light,--the gorgeous
sunrise of the southern mountain peaks where the wind is fresh out of
the universe and glitters and quivers with sparks of new life,--there
was the encampment of the hostiles. It was a small Eden of green grass
and water and trees high up in the Sierra--that strange mountain chain
that seems as though it might have been the giant model of the Aztec
builders, and that holds the mystery of a mysterious people locked in
its stone and metal breasts, as securely as it does that of the rich,
lost mines whose fabled wonders no man can prove to-day.
There is a majesty about the mountains of the desolate regions which is
not in those of more green and fertile lands. Loneliness and endurance
are written deep in their clefts and cañons and precipices. In the long
season of the sun, they look unshrinking back to the glaring sky, with a
stern defiance. It is as the very wrath of God, but they will not melt
before it. In the season of the rains, black clouds hang low upon them,
guarding their sullen gloom. But just as in the sternest heart is here
and there a spot of gentleness, so in these forbidding fastnesses there
are bits of verdure and soft beauty too.
And the Indian may be trusted to know of these. Here where the jacales
clustered, there was grass and wood and water that might last
indefinitely. The fortifications of Nature had been added to those of
Nature's man. It was a stronghold.
But the Apaches held it for only a day, for all that. They were
unprepared and overconfident. Their bucks were for the most part away
plundering the hapless Mexican settlements in the desert below. They had
thought that no white troops nor Mexicans could follow here, and they
had neglected to count with the scouts, who had been hostiles themselves
in their day, and who had the thief's advantage in catching a thief. And
so while the bucks and children wandered round among the trees or bathed
in the creek, while the hobbled ponies grazed leisurely on the rank
grass, and the squaws carried fuel and built fires and began their day
of drudgery, they were surprised.
The fight began with a shot fired prematurely by one of the scouts, and
lasted until nightfall--after the desultory manner of Indian mountain
fights, where you fire at a tree-trunk or lichened rock, or at some
black, red-bound head that shoots up quick as a prairie dog's and is
gone again, and where you follow the tactics of the wary Apache in so
far as you may. The curious part of it is that you beat him at his own
game every time. It is always the troops that lose the least heavily!
The Indian wars of the southwest have been made a very small side issue
in our history. The men who have carried them on have gained little
glory and little fame. And yet they have accomplished a big task, and
accomplished it well. They have subdued an enemy many times their own
number. And the enemy has had such enormous advantages, too. He has been
armed, since the 70's, even better than the troops. He has been upon his
own ground--a ground that was alone enough to dismay the soldier, and
one that gave him food, where it gave the white man death by starvation
and thirst. He knew every foot of the country, fastnesses, water holes,
creeks, and strongholds over thousands of miles. The best cavalry can
travel continuously but twenty-five or thirty miles a day, carrying its
own rations. The Apache, stealing his stock and food as he runs, covers
his fifty or seventy-five. The troops must find and follow trails that
are disguised with impish craft. The Apache goes where he lists, and
that, as a general thing, over country where devils would fear to tread.
Then throw into the scale the harassing and conflicting orders of a War
Department, niggardly with its troops, several thousand miles away,
wrapped in a dark veil of ignorance, and add the ever ready blame of the
territorial citizen and press, and the wonder is, not that it took a
score of years to settle the Apache question, but that it was ever
settled at all.
The all-day fight in the Sierra Madre stronghold was a very uneven one.
There were two hundred and fifty of the government forces against some
thirty-five bucks. But, after all, the number comes to nothing. You may
as well shoot at one enemy as at a thousand, if he is not to be seen
anyway, and you cannot hit him.
Cairness reflected upon this as he fired for exactly the seventh time at
a pair of beady eyes that flashed at him over a bush-topped rock by the
creek, not five and twenty yards away, and then vanished utterly. There
was something uncanny about it, and he was losing patience as well as
ammunition. Three bullets from a repeating rifle had about finished him.
One had gone through his hat. The eyes popped up again. Cairness fired
again and missed. Then he did a thoroughly silly thing. He jumped out
from behind his shelter and ran and leapt, straight down, and over to
the rock by the stream. The beady eyes saw him coming and sparkled, with
an evil sort of laughter.
If Cairness had not slipped and gone sprawling down at that moment, the
fourth bullet would have brought him up short. It sung over him,
instead, and splashed against a stone, and when he got to his feet again
the eyes had come out from their hiding-place. They were in the head of
a very young buck. He had sprung to the top of his rock and was dancing
about with defiant hilarity, waving his hands and the Winchester, and
grimacing tantalizingly. "_Yaw! ya!_" he screeched. Cairness discharged
his revolver, but the boy whooped once more and was down, dodging around
the stone. Cairness dodged after him, wrath in his heart and also a vow
to switch the little devil when he should get him. But he did not seem
to be getting him.
The fighting stopped to watch the Ojo-blanco playing tag with the little
Apache, right in the heart of the stronghold. The general stood still,
with a chuckle, and looked on. "Naughty little boy," he remarked to the
captain of the scouts; "but your man Cairness won't catch him, though."
With the sublime indifference to the mockery of the world,
characteristic of his race, Cairness kept at it. It was ridiculous. He
had time to be dimly aware of that. And it certainly was not war. He did
not know that they were affording the opposing forces much enjoyment. He
had not even observed that the firing had stopped. But he meant to catch
that much qualifiedly impudent little beast, or to know the reason why.
And he would probably have known the reason why, if one of the Apache
scouts, embarrassed by no notions of fair play, had not taken good aim
and brought his youthful kinsman down, with a bullet through his knee.
The black eyes snapped with pain as he fell, but when Cairness, with a
breathless oath at the spoiler of sport, whoever he might be, pounced
down upon him, the snap turned to a twinkle. The little buck raised
himself on his elbow. "How! Cairness," he grinned. "How Mees Landor?"
Cairness stopped short, speechless, with his mouth open. He did not even
dodge after a bullet had hummed past his head. "Who the devil--!" he
began. Then it dawned upon him. It was Felipa's protégé of the old Camp
Thomas days.
He was standing, and the boy was lying, and the shots of the Apaches
flew about them. He stooped, and catching up his defeated foe, whose
defeat was not half so entire as his own, scrambled out of the pocket
and back among the troops. He carried his prisoner, who kicked
vigorously with his good leg, and struck with both fists in protest
against the ignominy of being held under anybody's arm like a sack of
grain, back to the tied horses.
"Look out for the little customer, will you?" he said to the medical
officer. "He's a great chum of mine. Many's the can of condensed milk
and bag of peanuts the ungrateful young one has had out of me." "What
are you doing here?" he asked in the White Mountain idiom; "you aren't a
Chiricahua."
The boy grinned again. "How Mees Landor?" he repeated. His savage
perception had noted that those words had some "medicine" or other that
paralyzed the Ojo-blanco temporarily. Cairness swore at him in good
English, and went off abruptly.
At sunset the camp surrendered. There were seven dead bucks found, but
no one ever knew, of course, how many had fallen into ravines, or
dragged themselves off to die in nooks. The Apache does not dread death,
but he dreads having the White-man know that he has died.
The spoils of the rancheria were varied, and some of them interesting as
well. There were quite a hundred mules and horses, and there was money,
to the sum of five thousand dollars or more. Also there were gold and
silver watches and clothes and saddles and bridles--all the loot of the
unhappy haciendas and pueblas down on the flat. But the most treasured
of all their possessions was a little photograph album which had begun
its varied career in the particular home of the misguided Indian
philanthropist, Boston.
There was human plunder, too--women from the villages, all Mexicans but
one, and that one was American. Cairness, having gone off with some
scouts to reconnoitre, did not see them that night. When he came back it
was already dark, and he took his supper; and rolling himself in his
blanket slept, as he had always for the past fortnight, with only the
faintly radiant night sky above him.
In the morning, while the cooks were getting breakfast and the steam of
ration-Rio mounted as a grateful incense to the pink and yellow daybreak
heavens, having bathed in the creek and elaborated his toilet with a
clean neckerchief in celebration of victory, he walked over to the bunch
of tepees to see the women captives.
He knew while he was yet afar off which was the American. She stood, big
and gaunt, with her feet planted wide and her fists on her hips, looking
over toward the general's tent. And when Cairness came nearer, strolling
along with his hands in his pockets, observing the beauties of Nature
and the entire vileness of man, she turned her head and gave him a
defiant stare. He took his hands from his pockets and went forward,
raising his disreputable campaign hat. "Good morning, Mrs. Lawton," he
said, not that he quite lived up to the excellent standard of Miss
Winstanley, but that he understood the compelling force of civility, not
to say the bewilderment. If you turn its bright light full in the face
of one whose eyes are accustomed to the obscurity wherein walk the
underbred, your chances for dazzling him until he shall fall into any
pit you may have dug in his pathway are excellent.
Nor was he disconcerted that she met him with a stony front and a glare
of wrath. She glanced down at his outstretched hand, and kept her own
great bony one on her hip still. Then she looked at him squarely again.
She did not say "Well?" but she meant it. So he answered it blandly, and
suggested that she had probably forgotten him, but that he had had the
pleasure of meeting her once in the States. She continued to stare. He
held that a husband is a husband still until the law or death says
otherwise, and that it was no part of a man's business to inquire into
the domestic relations of his friends; so he said that he had had the
pleasure of meeting her husband recently. "He was at Fort Stanton," he
added, "upon some little matter of business, I believe. You will be glad
to hear that he was well." He did not see fit to add that he was also in
the county jail, awaiting trial on charge of destruction of government
property.
"What's your name, young feller?" she demanded. Cairness was hurt.
"Surely, Mrs. Lawton, you have not so entirely forgotten me. I am
Charles Cairness, very much at your service." But she had forgotten, and
she said so.
He hesitated with a momentary compunction. She must have suffered pretty
well for her sins already; her work-cut, knotty hands and her haggard
face and the bend of her erstwhile too straight shoulders--all showed
that plainly enough. It were not gallant; it might even be said to be
cruel to worry her. But he remembered the dead Englishwoman, with her
babies, stiff and dead, too, beside her on the floor of the charred
cabin up among the mountains, and his heart was hardened.
"I spent a few days with the Kirbys once," he said, and looked straight
into her eyes. They shifted, and there was no mistaking her uneasiness.
He followed it up instantly on a bold hazard. It had to be done now,
before she had time to retreat to the cover of her blank stolidity. "Why
did you leave them to be massacred? What did you have against her and
those little children?"
"I didn't. None of your business," she defied him.
"I beg your pardon, madam," he said. "It happens to be my business,
though."
Breakfast call sounded. At the first shrill note she started violently.
She was very thoroughly unnerved, and he decided that an hour of
thinking would make her worse so. He told her that he would see her
after breakfast, and raising his hat again left her to the anticipation,
and to helping the Mexican captives cook their meal of mescal root and
rations.
Later in the day, when the general and the interpreters were engaged in
making clear to the bucks, who came straggling in to surrender, the
wishes and intentions of the Great Father in Washington as regarded his
refractory children in Arizona, he went back to the captives' tepee. The
Texan was nowhere to be seen. He called to her and got no answer, then
he looked in. She was not there. One of the Mexican women was standing
by, and he went up to her and asked for the Gringa.
The woman shrugged her round brown shoulders from which the rebozo had
fallen quite away, and dropped her long lashes. "_No se_," she murmured.
"_Ay que si!_ You do know," he laughed; "you tell me _chula_, or I will
take you back to the United States with me."
She laughed too, musically, with a bewitching gurgle, and gave him a
swift glance, at once soft and sad. "_Ella es muy fea, no es simpatica,
la Gringa._"
Undoubtedly, as she said, the American was ugly and unattractive; but
the Mexican was pretty and decidedly engaging. Cairness had been too
nearly trapped once before to be lured now. He met the piece of brown
femininity upon her own ground. "You are quite right, _querida mia_. She
is ugly and old, and you are beautiful and young, and I will take you
with me to the States and buy a pink dress with lovely green ribbons, if
you will tell me where the old woman is."
"_'Stá bajo_," she stuck out her cleft chin in the direction of the
trail that led out of the pocket down to the flat, far below.
"_De veras?_" asked Cairness, sharply. He was of no mind to lose her
like this, when he was so near his end.
"Truly," said the little thing, and nodded vehemently.
He left her ignominiously, at a run. She stood laughing after him until
he jumped over a rock and disappeared. "She is his sweetheart, the
_vieja_," she chattered to her companions.
Cairness called to four of his scouts as he ran. They joined him, and he
told them to help him search. In half an hour they found her, cowering
in a cranny of rocks and manzanita. He dismissed the Indians, and then
spoke to her. "Now you sit on that stone there and listen to me," he
said, and taking her by the shoulder put her down and stood over her.
She kept her sullen glance on the ground, but she was shaking violently.
"Your husband is in jail," he said without preface. He had done with
the mask of civility. It had served its purpose.
"No he ain't."
"Yes he is. And I put him there." He left her to what he saw was her
belief that it was because of the Kirby affair. "You'll see when you get
back. And I'll put you there, too, if I care to. The best chance you
have is to do as I tell you."
She was silent, but the stubbornness was going fast. She broke off a
bunch of little pink blossoms and rolled it in her hands.
"Your best chance for keeping out of jail, too," he insisted, "is to
keep on the right side of me. _Sabe?_ Now what I want to know is, what
part Stone has in all this." He did not know what part any one had had
in it, as a matter of fact, for he had failed in all attempts to make
Lawton talk, in the two days he had had before leaving the post.
"Why don't you ask him?" said Mrs. Lawton, astutely.
"Because I prefer to ask you, that's why--and to make you answer, too."
He sat down cross-legged on the ground, facing her. "I've got plenty of
time, my dear woman. I can stop here all day if you can, you know," he
assured her. Afterward he made a painting of her as she had sat there,
in among the rocks and the scrub growth, aged, bent, malevolent, and in
garments that were picturesque because they were rags. He called it the
Sibyl of the Sierra Madre. And, like the Trojan, he plied her with
questions--not of the future, but of the past. "Well," he said, "are you
going to answer me?"
"Didn't you find out from him?" she asked.
He changed his position leisurely, stretching out at full length and
resting his head on his hand by way of gaining time. Then he told her
that it was not until after he had caught and landed her husband that he
had discovered that Stone was in it.
"Who told you he was?" she asked.
"Never mind all that. I'm here to question, not to be questioned. Now
listen to me." And he went on to point out how she could not possibly
get away from him and the troops until they were across the border, and
that once there, it lay with him to turn her over to the authorities or
to set her free. "You can take your choice, of course. I give you my
word--and I think you are quite clever enough to believe me--that if you
do not tell me what I want to know about Stone, I will land you where
I've landed your husband; and that if you do, you shall go free after
I've done with you. Now I can wait until you decide to answer," and he
rolled over on his back, put his arms under his head, and gazed up at
the jewel-blue patch of sky.
There was a long pause. A hawk lighted on a point of rock and twinkled
its little eyes at them. Two or three squirrels whisked in and out. Once
a scout came by and stood looking at them, then went on, noiselessly, up
the mountain side.
"What do you want to know for?" asked the woman, at length.
He repeated that he was not there to be questioned, and showed her that
he meant it by silence.