University of Virginia Library

12. CHAPTER XII.

The Apaches were discouraged by the immovability of the train, and by the
steady and deadly resistance of its defenders. From first to last some twenty-five
or twenty-seven of their warriors had been hit, of whom probably one third
were killed or mortally wounded.

At the approach of Coronado those who were around the wagons swept away
in a panic, and never paused in their flight until they were a good half mile distant.
They carried off, however, every man, whether dead or injured, except
one alone. A few rods from the train lay a mere boy, certainly not over fifteen
years old, his forehead gashed by a bullet, and life apparently extinct. There
was nothing strange in the fact of so young a lad taking part in battle, for the
military age among the Indians is from twelve to thirty-six, and one third of
their fighters are children.

“What did they leave that fellow for?” said Coronado in surprise, riding up
to the senseless figure.

“I'll fix him,” volunteered Texas Smith, dismounting and drawing his hunting
knife. “Reckon he hain't been squarely finished.”

“Stop!” ordered Coronado. “He is not an Apache. He is some pueblo
Indian. See how much he is hurt.”

“Skull ain't broke,” replied Texas, fingering the wound as roughly as if it
had been in the flesh of a beast. “Reckon he'll flop round. May do mischief,
if we don't fix him.”

Anxious to stick his knife into the defenceless young throat, he nevertheless
controlled his sentiments and looked up for instructions. Since the splendid
decapitation which Coronado had performed, Texas respected him as he had
never heretofore hoped to respect a “greaser.”

“Perhaps we can get information out of him,” said Coronado. “Suppose
you lay him in a wagon.”

Meanwhile preparations had been made for an advance. The four dead or
badly wounded draft mules were disentangled from the harness, and their places
supplied with the four army mules, whose packs were thrown into the wagons.

These animals, by the way, had escaped injury, partly because they had been
tethered between the two lines of vehicles, and partly because they had been
well covered by their loads, which were plentifully stuck with arrows.

“We are ready to march,” said Thurstane to Coronado. “I am sorry we
can't try to recover your men back there.”

“No use,” commented Texas Smith. “The Patchies have been at 'em.
They're chuck full of spear holes by this time.”

Coronado shouted to the drivers to start. Commencing on the right, the
wagons filed off two by two toward the mouth of the cañon, while the Indians,
gathered in a group half a mile away, looked on without a yell or a movement.
The instant that the vehicle which contained the ladies had cleared itself of the
others, Thurstane and Coronado rode alongside of it.

“So! you are safe!” said the former. “By Heavens, if they had hurt
you!”

“And you?” asked Clara, very quickly and eagerly, while scanning him from
head to foot.

Coronado saw that look, anxious for Thurstane alone; and, master of dissimulation
though he was, his face showed both pain and anger.

“Ah—oh—oh dear!” groaned Mrs. Stanley, as she made her appearance in
the front of the vehicle. “Well! this is rather more than I can bear. This is
just as much as a woman can put up with. Dear me! what is the matter with
your arm, Lieutenant?”

“Just a pin prick,” said Thurstane.

Clara began to get out of the wagon, with the purpose of going to him, her
eyes staring and her face pale.

“Don't!” he protested, motioning her back. “It is nothing.”

And, although the lacerated arm hurt him and was not easy to manage, he
raised it over his head to show that the damage was trifling.

“Do get in here and let us take care of you,” begged Clara.

“Certainly!” echoed Aunt Maria, who was a compassionate woman at heart,
and who only lacked somewhat in quickness of sympathy, perhaps by reason of
her strong-minded notions.

“I will when I need it,” said Ralph, flattered and gratified. “The arm will
do without dressing till we reach camp. There are other wounded. Everybody
has fought. Mr. Coronado here has done deeds worthy of his ancestors.”

“Ah, Mr. Coronado!” smiled Aunt Maria, delighted that her favorite had
distinguished himself.

“Captain Glover, what's the matter with your nose?” was the lady's next
outcry.

“Wal, it's been bored,” replied Glover, tenderly fingering his sore proboscis.
“It's been, so to speak, eyelet-holed. I'm glad I hadn't but one. The more
noses a feller kerries in battle, the wuss for him. I hope the darned rip 'll heal
up. I've no 'casion to hev a line rove through it 'n' be towed, that I know of.”

“How did it feel when it went through?” asked Aunt Maria, full of curiosity
and awe.

“Felt 's though I'd got the dreadfullest influenzee thet ever snorted.
Twitched 'n' tickled like all possessed.”

“Was it an arrow?” inquired the still unsatisfied lady.

“Reckon 'twas. Never see it. But it kinder whished, 'n' I felt the feathers.
Darn 'em! When I felt the feathers, tell ye I was 'bout half scairt. Hed 'n idee
'f th' angel 'f death, 'n' so on.”

Of course Aunt Maria and Clara wanted to do much nursing immediately
but there were no conveniences and there was no time; and so benevolence was
postponed.

“So you are hurt?” said Thurstane to Texas Smith, noticing his torn and
bloody shirt.

“It's jest a scrape,” grunted the bushwhacker. “Mought 'a' been worse.”

“It was bad generalship trying to save you. We nearly paid high for it.”

“That's so. Cost four greasers, as 'twas. Well, I'm worth four greasers.”

“You're a devil of a fighter,” continued the Lieutenant, surveying the ferocious
face and sullen air of the cutthroat with a soldier's admiration for whatever
expresses pugnacity.

“Bet yer pile on it,” returned Texas, calmly conscious of his character. “So
be you.”

The savage black eyes and the imperious blue ones stared into each other
without the least flinching and with something like friendliness.

Coronado rode up to the pair and asked, “Is that boy alive yet?”

“It's about time for him to flop round,” replied Texas indifferently. “Reckon
you'll find him in the off hind wagon. I shoved him in thar.”

Coronado cantered to the off hind wagon, peeped through the rear opening
of its canvas cover, discovered the youth lying on a pile of luggage, addressed
him in Spanish, and learned his story. He belonged to a hacienda in Bernalillo,
a hundred miles or more west of Santa Fé. The Apaches had surprised the
hacienda and plundered it, carrying him off because, having formerly been a captive
among them, he could speak their language, manage the bow, etc.

For all this Coronado cared nothing; he wanted to know why the band had
left Bernalillo; also why it had attacked his train. The boy explained that the
raiders had been driven off the southern route by a party of United States cavalry,
and that, having lost a number of their braves in the fight, they had sworn
vengeance on Americans.

“Did you hear them say whose train this was?” demanded Coronado.

“No, Señor.”

“Do you think they knew?”

“Señor, I think not.”

“Whose band was this?”

“Manga Colorada's.”

“Where is Delgadito?”

“Delgadito went the other side of the mountain. They were both going to
fight the Moquis.”

“So we shall find Delgadito in the Moqui valley?”

“I think so, Señor.”

After a moment of reflection Coronado added, “You will stay with us and
take care of mules. I will do well by you.”

“Thanks, Señor. Many thanks.”

Coronado rejoined Thurstane and told his news. The officer looked grave;
there might be another combat in store for the train; it might be an affair with
both bands of the Apaches.

“Well,” he said, “we must keep our eyes open. Every one of us must do
his very utmost. On the whole, I can't believe they can beat us.”

“Nombre de Dios!” thought Coronado. “How will this accursed job end?
I wish I were out of it.”

They were now traversing the cañon from which they had been so long debarred.

It was a peaceful solitude; no life but their own stirred within its sandstone
ramparts; and its windings soon carried them out of sight of their late assailants.
For four hours they slowly threaded it, and when night came on they
were still in it, miles away from their expected camping ground. No water and
no grass; the animals were drooping with hunger, and all suffered with thirst;
the worst was that the hurts of the wounded could not be properly dressed.
But progress through this labyrinth of stones in the darkness was impossible,
and the weary, anxious, fevered travellers bivouacked as well as might be.

Starting at dawn, they finished the cañon in about an hour, traversed an uneven
plateau which stretched beyond its final sinuous branch gullies, and found
themselves on the brow of a lofty terrace, overlooking a sublime panorama.
There was an immense valley, not smooth and verdurous, but a gigantic nest of
savage buttes and crags and hills, only to be called a valley because it was enclosed
by what seemed a continuous line of eminences. On the north and east
rose long ranges and elevated table-lands; on the west, the savage rolls and
precipices of the Sierra del Carrizo; and on the south, a more distant bordering
of hazy mountains, closing to the southwest, a hundred miles away, in the noble
snowy peaks of Monte San Francisco.

With his field-glass, Thurstane examined one after another of the mesas and
buttes which diversified this enormous depression. At last his attention settled
on an isolated bluff or mound, with a flattened surface three or four miles in
length, the whole mass of which seemed to be solid and barren rock. On this
truncated pyramid he distinguished, or thought he distinguished, one or more of
the pueblos of the Moquis. He could not be quite sure, because the distance
was fifteen miles, and the walls of these villages are of the same stone with the
buttes upon which they stand.

“There is our goal, if I am not mistaken,” he said to Coronado. “When
we get there we can rest.”

The train pushed onward, slowly descending the terrace, or rather the succession
of terraces. After reaching a more level region, and while winding between
stony hills of a depressing sterility, it came suddenly, at the bottom of a
ravine, upon fresh green turf and thickets of willows, the environment of a small
spring of clear water. There was a halt; all hands fell to digging a trench
across the gully; when it had filled, the animals were allowed to drink; in an
hour more they had closely cropped all the grass. This was using up time perilously,
but it had to be done, for the beasts were tottering.

Moving again; five miles more traversed; another spring and patch of turf
discovered; a rough ravine through a low sandstone ridge threaded; at last they
were on one of the levels of the valley. Three of the Moqui towns were now
about eight miles distant, and with his glass Thurstane could distinguish
the horizontal lines of building. The trail made straight for the pueblos, but it
was almost impassable to wagons, and progress was very slow. It was all the
slower because of the weakness of the mules, which throughout all this hair-brained
journey had been severely worked, and of late had been poorly fed.

Presently the travellers turned the point of a naked ridge which projected
laterally into the valley. There they came suddenly upon a wide-spread sweep
of turf, contrasting so brilliantly with the bygone infertilities that it seemed to
them a paradise, and stretching clear on to the bluff of the pueblos.

There, too, with equal suddenness, they came upon peril. Just beyond the
nose of the sandstone promontory there was a bivouc of half-naked, dark-skinned
horsemen, recognizable at a glance as Apaches. It was undoubtedly
the band of Delgadito.

The camp was half a mile distant. The Indians, evidently surprised at the
appearance of the train, were immediately in commotion. There was a rapid
mounting, and in five minutes they were all on horseback, curveting in circles,
and brandishing their lances, but without advancing.

“Manga Colorada hasn't reached here yet,” observed Thurstane.

“That's so,” assented Texas Smith. “They hain't heerd from the cuss, or
they'd a bushwhacked us somewhar. Seein' he dasn't follow our trail, he had
to make a big turn to git here. But he'll be droppin' along, an' then we'll hev a
fight. I reckon we'll hev one anyway. Them cusses ain't friendly. If they was,
they'd a piled in helter-skelter to hev a talk an' ask fur whiskey.”

“We must keep them at a distance,” said Thurstane.

“You bet! The first Injun that comes nigh us, I'll shute him. They mustn't
be 'lowed to git among us. First you know you'd hear a yell, an' find yourself
speared in the back. An' them that's speared right off is the lucky ones.”

“Not one of us must fall into their hands,” muttered the officer, thinking of
Clara.

“Cap, that's so,” returned Texas grimly. “When I fight Injuns, I never
empty my revolver. I keep one barl for myself. You'd better do the same.
Furthermore, thar oughter be somebody detailed to shute the women folks when
it comes to the last pinch. I say this as a friend.”

As a friend! It was the utmost stretch of Texas Smith's humanity and
sympathy. Obviously the fellow had a soft side to him.

The fact is that he had taken a fancy to Thurstane since he had learned his
fighting qualities, and would rather have done him a favor than murder him.
At all events his hatred to “Injuns” was such that he wanted the lieutenant to
kill a great many of them before his own turn came.

“So you think we'll have a tough job of it?” inferred Ralph.

“Cap, we ain't so many as we was. An' if Manga Colorada comes up, thar'll
be a pile of red-skins. It may be they'll outlast us; an' so I say as a friend,
save one shot; save it for yourself, Cap.”

But the Apaches did not advance. They watched the train steadily; they held
a long consultation which evidently referred to it; at last they seemed to decide
that it was in too good order to fall an easy prey; there was some wild capering
along its flanks, at a safe distance; and then, little by little, the gang resettled
in its bivouac. It was like a swarm of hornets, which should sally out to
reconnoitre an enemy, buzz about threateningly for a while, and sail back to
their nest.

The plain, usually dotted with flocks of sheep, was now a solitude. The
Moquis had evidently withdrawn their woolly wealth either to the summit of
the bluff, or to the partially sheltered pasturage around its base. The only objects
which varied the verdant level were scattered white rocks, probably gypsum
or oxide of manganese, which glistened surprisingly in the sunlight, reminding
one of pearls sown on a mantel of green velvet. But already the travellers
could see the peach orchards of the Moquis, and the sides of the lofty butte
laid out in gardens supported by terrace-walls of dressed stone, the whole mass
surmounted by the solid ramparts of the pueblos.

At this moment, while the train was still a little over two miles from the foot
of the bluff, and the Apache camp more than three miles to the rear, Texas
Smith shouted, “The cusses hev got the news.”

It was true; the foremost riders, or perhaps only the messengers, of Manga
Colorada had reached Delgadito; and a hundred warriors were swarming after
the train to avenge their fallen comrades.

Now ensued a race for life, the last pull of the mules being lashed out of
them, and the Indians riding at the topmost speed of their wiry ponies.