Overland :: :: University of Virginia Library

It was reported that the audacious and savage Apache chieftain, Manga Colorada,
or Red Sleeve, under pretence of wanting to make a treaty with the Americans,
had approached within sixty miles of Santa Fé to the west, and camped
there, on the route to the San Juan country, not making treaties at all, but simply
making hot beefsteaks out of Mexican cattle and cold carcasses out of Mexican
rancheros.

“We shall have to get those fellows off that trail and put them across the
Bernalillo route,” said Coronado to Garcia.

“The pigs! the dogs! the wicked beasts! the devils!” barked the old
man, dancing about the room in a rage. After a while he dropped breathless
into a chair and looked eagerly at his nephew for help.

“It will cost at least another thousand,” observed the younger man.

“You have had two thousand,” shuddered Garcia. “You were to do the
whole accursed job with that.”

“I did not count on Manga Colorada. Besides, I have given a thousand to
our little cousin. I must keep a thousand to meet the chances that may come.
There are men to be bribed.”

Garcia groaned, hesitated, decided, went to some hoard which he had put
aside for great needs, counted out a hundred American eagles, toyed with them,
wept over them, and brought them to Coronado.

“Will that do?” he asked. “It must do. There is no more.”

“I will try with that,” said the nephew. “Now let me have a few good men
and your best horses. I want to see them all before I trust myself with them.”

Coronado felt himself in a position to dictate, and it was curious to see how
quick he put on magisterial airs; he was one of those who enjoy authority,
though little and brief.

“Accursed beast!” thought Garcia, who did not dare just now to break out
with his “pig, dog,” etc. “He wants me to pay everything. The thousand
ought to be enough for men and horses and all. Why not poison the girl at
once, and save all this money? If he had the spirit of a man! O Madre de
Dios! Madre de Dios! What extremities! what extremities!”

But Garcia was like a good many of us; his thoughts were worse than his
deeds and words. While he was cogitating thus savagely, he was saying aloud,
“My son, my dear Carlos, come and choose for yourself.”

Turning into the court of the house, they strolled through a medley of wagons,
mules, horses, merchandise, muleteers, teamsters, idlers, white men and
Indians. Coronado soon picked out a couple of rancheros whom he knew as
capital riders, fair marksmen, faithful and intelligent. Next his eye fell upon a
man in Mexican clothing, almost as dark and dirty too as the ordinary Mexican,
but whose height, size, insolence of carriage, and ferocity of expression marked
him as of another and more pugnacious, more imperial race.

“You are an American,” said Coronado, in his civil manner, for he had two
manners as opposite as the poles.

“I be,” replied the stranger, staring at Coronado as a Lombard or Frankish
warrior might have stared at an effeminate and diminutive Roman.

“May I ask what your name is?”

“Some folks call me Texas Smith.”

Coronado shifted uneasily on his feet, as a man might shift in presence of a
tiger, who, as he feared, was insufficiently chained. He was face to face with a
fellow who was as much the terror of the table-land, from the borders of Texas
to California, as if he had been an Apache chief.

This noted desperado, although not more than twenty-six or seven years old,
had the horrible fame of a score of murders. His appearance mated well with
his frightful history and reputation. His intensely black eyes, blacker even
than the eyes of Coronado, had a stare of absolutely indescribable ferocity. It
was more ferocious than the merely brutal glare of a tiger; it was an intentional
malignity, super-beastly and sub-human. They were eyes which no other man
ever looked into and afterward forgot. His sunburnt, sallow, haggard, ghastly
face, stained early and for life with the corpse-like coloring of malarious fevers,
was a fit setting for such optics. Although it was nearly oval in contour, and
although the features were or had been fairly regular, yet it was so marked by
hard, and one might almost say fleshless muscles, and so brutalized by long indulgence
in savage passions, that it struck you as frightfully ugly. A large dull-red
scar on the right jaw and another across the left cheek added the final
touches to this countenance of a cougar.

“He is my man,” whispered Garcia to Coronado. “I have hired him for
the great adventure. Sixty piastres a month. Why not take him with you to-day?”

Coronado gave another glance at the gladiator and meditated. Should he
trust this beast of a Texan to guard him against those other beasts, the Apaches?
Well, he could die but once; this whole affair was detestably risky; he must
not lose time in shuddering over the first steps.

“Mr. Smith,” he said, “very glad to know that you are with us. Can you
start in an hour for the camp of Manga Colorada? Sixty miles there. We
must be back by to-morrow night. It would be best not to say where we are
going.”

Texas Smith nodded, turned abruptly on the huge heels of his Mexican
boots, stalked to where his horse was fastened, and began to saddle him.

“My dear uncle, why didn't you hire the devil?” whispered Coronado as he
stared after the cutthroat.

“Get yourself ready, my nephew,” was Garcia's reply. “I will see to the
men and horses.'

In an hour the expedition was off at full gallop. Coronado had laid aside
his American dandy raiment, and was in the full costume of a Mexican of the
provinces—broad-brimmed hat of white straw, blue broadcloth jacket adorned
with numerous small silver buttons, velvet vest of similar splendor, blue trousers
slashed from the knee downwards and gay with buttons, high, loose embroidered
boots of crimson leather, long steel spurs jingling and shining. The change became
him; he seemed a larger and handsomer man for it; he looked the caballero
and almost the hidalgo.

Three hours took the party thirty miles to a hacienda of Garcia's, where they
changed horses, leaving their first mounting for the return. After half an hour
for dinner, they pushed on again, always at a gallop, the hoofs clattering over
the hard, yellow, sunbaked earth, or dashing recklessly along smooth sheets of
rock, or through fields of loose, slippery stones. Rare halts to breathe the animals;
then the steady, tearing gallop again; no walking or other leisurely gait.
Coronado led the way and hastened the pace. There was no tiring him; his
thin, sinewy, sun-hardened frame could bear enormous fatigue; moreover, the
saddle was so familiar to him that he almost reposed in it. If he had needed
physical support, he would have found it in his mental energy. He was capable
of that executive furor, that intense passion of exertion, which the man of
Latin race can exhibit when he has once fairly set himself to an enterprise. He
was of the breed which in nobler days had produced Gonsalvo, Cortes, Pizarro,
and Darien.

These riders had set out at ten o'clock in the morning; at five in the afternoon
they drew bridle in sight of the Apache encampment. They were on the
brow of a stony hill: a pile of bare, gray, glaring, treeless, herbless layers of
rock; a pyramid truncated near its base, but still of majestic altitude; one of
the pyramids of nature in that region; in short, a butte. Below them lay a valley
of six or eight miles in length by one or two in breadth, through the centre of
which a rivulet had drawn a paradise of verdure. In the middle of the valley, at
the head of a bend in the rivulet, was a camp of human brutes. It was a bivouac
rather than a camp. The large tents of bison hide used by the northern Indians
are unknown to the Apaches; they have not the bison, and they have less need
of shelter in winter. What Coronado saw at this distance was, a few huts of
branches, a strolling of many horses, and some scattered riders.

Texas Smith gave him a glance of inquiry which said, “Shall we go ahead—
or fire?”

Coronado spurred his horse down the rough, disjointed, slippery declivity,
and the others followed. They were soon perceived; the Apache swarm was
instantly in a buzz; horses were saddled and mounted, or mounted without saddling;
there was a consultation, and then a wild dash toward the travellers. As
the two parties neared each other at a gallop, Coronado rode to the front of his
squad, waving his sombrero. An Indian who wore the dress of a Mexican caballero,
jacket, loose trousers, hat, and boots, spurred in like manner to the front,
gestured to his followers to halt, brought his horse to a walk, and slowly approached
the white man. Coronado made a sign to show that his pistols were
in his holsters; and the Apache responded by dropping his lance and slinging
his bow over his shoulder. The two met midway between the two squads of
staring, silent horsemen.

“Is it Manga Colorada?” asked the Mexican, in Spanish.

“Manga Colorada,” replied the Apache, his long, dark, haggard, savage face
lighting up for a moment with a smile of gratified vanity.

“I come in peace, then,” said Coronado. “I want your help; I will pay for it.”

In our account of this interview we shall translate the broken Spanish of the
Indian into ordinary English.

“Manga Colorada will help,” he said, “if the pay is good.”

Even during this short dialogue the Apaches had with difficulty restrained
their curiosity; and their little wiry horses were now caracoling, rearing, and
plunging in close proximity to the two speakers.

“We will talk of this by ourselves,” said Coronado. “Let us go to your
camp.”

The conjoint movement of the leaders toward the Indian bivouac was a signal
for their followers to mingle and exchange greetings. The adventurers were
enveloped and very nearly ridden down by over two hundred prancing, screaming
horsemen, shouting to their visitors in their own guttural tongue or in broken
Spanish, and enforcing their wild speech with vehement gestures. It was a
pandemonium which horribly frightened the Mexican rancheros, and made Coronado's
dark cheek turn to an ashy yellow.

The civilized imagination can hardly conceive such a tableau of savagery as
that presented by these Arabs of the great American desert. Arabs! The
similitude is a calumny on the descendants of Ishmael; the fiercest Bedouin
are refined and mild compared with the Apaches. Even the brutal and criminal
classes of civilization, the pugilists, roughs, burglars, and pickpockets of our
large cities, the men whose daily life is rebellion against conscience, commandment,
and justice, offer a gentler and nobler type of character and expression
than these “children of nature.” There was hardly a face among that gang of
wild riders which did not outdo the face of Texas Smith in degraded ferocity.
Almost every man and boy was obviously a liar, a thief, and a murderer. The
air of beastly cruelty was made even more hateful by an air of beastly cunning.
Taking color, brutality, grotesqueness, and filth together, it seemed as if here
were a mob of those malignant and ill-favored devils whom Dante has described
and the art of his age has painted and sculptured.

It is possible, by the way, that this appearance of moral ugliness was due in
part to the physical ugliness of features, which were nearly without exception
coarse, irregular, exaggerated, grotesque, and in some cases more like hideous
masks than like faces.

Ferocity of expression was further enhanced by poverty and squalor. The
mass of this fierce cavalry was wretchedly clothed and disgustingly dirty. Even
the showy Mexican costume of Manga Colorada was ripped, frayed, stained with
grease and perspiration, and not free from sombre spots which looked like blood.
Every one wore the breech-cloth, in some cases nicely fitted and sewed, in others
nothing but a shapeless piece of deerskin tied on anyhow. There were a few,
either minor chiefs, or leading braves, or professional dandies (for this class exists
among the Indians), who sported something like a full Apache costume,
consisting of a helmet-shaped cap with a plume of feathers, a blanket or scrape
flying loose from the shoulders, a shirt and breech-cloth, and a pair of long boots,
made large and loose in the Mexican style and showy with dyeing and embroidery.
These boots, very necessary to men who must ride through thorns and
bushes, were either drawn up so as to cover the thighs or turned over from the
knee downward, like the leg-covering of Rupert's cavaliers. Many heads were
bare, or merely shielded by wreaths of grasses and leaves, the greenery contrasting
fantastically with the unkempt hair and fierce faces, but producing at a distance
an effect which was not without sylvan grace.

The only weapons were iron-tipped lances eight or nine feet long, thick and

strong bows of three or three and a half feet, and quivers of arrows slung across
the thigh or over the shoulder. The Apaches make little use of firearms, being
too lazy or too stupid to keep them in order, and finding it difficult to get ammunition.
But so long as they have to fight only the unwarlike Mexicans, they are
none the worse for this lack. The Mexicans fly at the first yell; the Apaches
ride after them and lance them in the back; clumsy escopetos drop loaded from
the hands of dying cowards. Such are the battles of New Mexico. It is only
when these red-skinned Tartars meet Americans or such high-spirited Indians
as the Opates that they have to recoil before gunpowder.[1]

The fact that Coronado dared ride into this camp of thieving assassins shows
what risks he could force himself to run when he thought it necessary. He was
not physically a very brave man; he had no pugnacity and no adventurous love
of danger for its own sake; but when he was resolved on an enterprise, he could
go through with it.

There was a rest of several hours. The rancheros fed the horses on corn
which they had brought in small sacks. Texas Smith kept watch, suffered no
Apache to touch him, had his pistols always cocked, and stood ready to sell life
at the highest price. Coronado walked deliberately to a retired spot with Manga
Colorada, Delgadito, and two other chiefs, and made known his propositions.
What he desired was that the Apaches should quit their present post immediately,
perform a forced march of a hundred and forty miles or so to the southwest,
place themselves across the overland trail through Bernalillo, and do something
to alarm people. No great harm; he did not want men murdered nor
houses burned; they might eat a few cattle, if they were hungry: there were
plenty of cattle, and Apaches must live. And if they should yell at a train or
so and stampede the loose mules, he had no objection. But no slaughtering;
he wanted them to be merciful: just make a pretence of harrying in Bernalillo;
nothing more.

The chiefs turned their ill-favored countenances on each other, and talked for
a while in their own language. Then, looking at Coronado, they grunted, nodded,
and sat in silence, waiting for his terms.

“Send that boy away,” said the Mexican, pointing to a youth of twelve or
fourteen, better dressed than most Apache urchins, who had joined the little circle.

“It is my son,” replied Manga Colorada. “He is learning to be a chief.”

The boy stood upright, facing the group with dignity, a handsomer youth
than is often seen among his people. Coronado, who had something of the artist
in him, was so interested in noting the lad's regular features and tragic firmness
of expression, that for a moment he forgot his projects. Manga Colorada,
mistaking the cause of his silence, encouraged him to proceed.

“My son does not speak Spanish,” he said. “He will not understand.”

“You know what money is?” inquired the Mexican.

“Yes, we know,” grunted the chief.

“You can buy clothes and arms with it in the villages, and aguardiente.'

Another grunt of assent and satisfaction.

“Three hundred piastres,” said Coronado.

The chiefs consulted in their own tongue, and then replied, “The way is long.

“How much?”

Manga Colorada held up five fingers.

“Five hundred?'

A unanimous grunt.

“It is all I have,” said Coronado.

The chiefs made no reply.

Coronado rose, walked to his horse, took two small packages out of his saddle-bags
and slipped them slily into his boots, and then carried the bags to where
the chiefs sat in council. There he held them up and rolled out five rouleaux,
each containing a hundred Mexican dollars. The Indians tore open the envelopes,
stared at the broad pieces, fingered them, jingled them together, and uttered
grunts of amazement and joy. Probably they had never before seen so
much money, at least not in their own possession. Coronado was hardly less
content; for while he had received a thousand dollars to bring about this understanding,
he had risked but seven hundred with him, and of these he had saved
two hundred.

Four hours later the camp had vanished, and the Indians were on their way
toward the southwest, the moonlight showing their irregular column of march,
and glinting faintly from the heads of their lances.

At nine or ten in the evening, when every Apache had disappeared, and the
clatter of ponies had gone far away into the quiet night, Coronado lay down to
rest. He would have started homeward, but the country was a complete desert,
the trail led here and there over vast sheets of trackless rock, and he feared that
he might lose his way. Texas Smith and one of the rancheros had ridden after
the Apaches to see whether they kept the direction which had been agreed upon.
One ranchero was slumbering already, and the third crouched as sentinel.

Coronado could not sleep at once. He thought over his enterprise, cross-examined
his chances of success, studied the invisible courses of the future.
Leave Clara on the plains, to be butchered by Indians, or to die of starvation?
He hardly considered the idea; it was horrible and repulsive; better marry her.
If necessary, force her into a marriage; he could bring it about somehow; she
would be much in his power. Well, he had got rid of Thurstane; that was a
great obstacle removed. Probably, that fellow being out of sight, he, Coronado,
could soon eclipse him in the girl's estimation. There would be no need of violence;
all would go easily and end in prosperity. Garcia would be furious at
the marriage, but Garcia was a fool to expect any other result.

However, here he was, just at the beginning of things, and by no means safe
from danger. He had two hundred dollars in his boot-legs. Had his rancheros
suspected it? Would they murder him for the money? He hoped not; he just
faintly hoped not; for he was becoming very sleepy; he was asleep.

He was awakened by a noise, or perhaps it was a touch, he scarcely knew
what. He struggled as fiercely and vainly as one who fights against a nightmare.
A dark form was over him, a hard knee was on his breast, hard knuckles were
at his throat, an arm was raised to strike, a weapon was gleaming.

On the threshold of his enterprise, after he had taken its first hazardous step
with safety and success, Coronado found himself at the point of death.

[1]

Since those times the Apaches have learned to use firearms.