University of Virginia Library

19. CHAPTER XIX.

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 manœuvre 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 mélée 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 unlke 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 trap-door
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.