When the West Was Young. Frederick R. Bechdolt
He waited for some moments, scanning the rising fumes, then swerved his lean brown torso toward a mesquite bush. He stripped the leaves from a twig and scattered them upon the blaze. A white puff climbed into the sky.
From time to time he moved, now dropping on his belly to blow the coals, now feeding them with resin, now with leaves. The slender column crawled on upward taking alternate complexion, white and black.
Where the bare summits of the Dragoon range broke into a multitude of ragged pinnacles against the eastern horizon, another swarthy warrior stood, remote as a roosting eagle on the heights. Beneath his feet––the drop was so sheer that he could have kicked a pebble to the bottom without its touching the face of the cliff in its fall––the shadows of the mountain lay black on the mesquite flat. He gazed across that wide plain and the mesas climbing heavenward beyond it in a series of glowing steps. His face assumed a peculiar intentness 59 as he watched the distant smoke column; it was the intentness of a man who is reading under difficulties. In dot and dash he spelled it as it rose––the tidings of those two prospectors who traveled up the wash.
While the last puff was fading away he glided down from pinnacle to narrow shelf, from shelf to cliff, and made his way toward the rocks below to tell the news to the rest of his band.
Their camp lay at the head of a steep gorge. Several low wickiups had been fashioned by binding the tops of bushes together and throwing skins or tattered blankets over the arched stems. Offal and carrion were strewn all about the place; it swarmed with flies. Nesting vultures would have built more carefully and been fully as fastidious. When the warrior reached the spot the rocks became alive with naked forms; they appeared from all sides as suddenly and silently as quail.
He told the tidings to the men. An unclean, vermin-ridden group, they squatted around him while he repeated the smoke message, word for word. There was no particular show of enthusiasm among them, no sign of haste. They began to prepare for this business as other men begin getting ready for a day’s work, when they see good wages ahead of them and the task is very much to their taste. Prospectors were becoming an old story in that summer of 1877; two of them meant good pickings––bacon, coffee, sugar, and firearms; and there was the fun of killing with the chance for torture thrown in.
Some of the band departed leisurely to catch the ponies. The victims would be busy for a long time in 60 the wash. They would not travel far to make their camp. And wherever they went they must leave tracks. The day was far advanced when the party rode forth upon the flat, their dirty turbans bobbing up and down above the mesquite bushes as they came along.
Several of them carried lances; there was a sprinkling of bows and arrows; a number bore rifles across their saddles, wearing the cartridge-belts athwart their naked bodies. All of them moved their thin brown legs ceaselessly; their moccasined shanks kept up a constant drumming against the ponies’ sides.
The afternoon was old when they reached the dry wash. They left two or three of their number behind in charge of the ponies. The others came on afoot. Two leaders went well in advance, one of them on each bank, creeping from rock to tufted yucca and from yucca to mesquite clump, watching the sun-flayed land before them for some sign of their game. A squad of trackers slipped in and out among the dagger-plants and boulders in the bottom of the gulch.
One of the trackers held up his hand and moved it swiftly. To the signal the others gathered about him. He pointed to the outcropping of high-grade ore. They saw the traces left by a prospector’s pick. For some minutes their voices mingled in low gutturals. Then they scattered to pick up the trail, found it, and resumed their progress down the arroyo.
Evening came on them when they reached the river-bottom; and with the deepening shadows, fear. Night with the Apache was the time of the dead. They made their camp. But when the sun was coloring the eastern 61 sky the next morning they were crawling through the bear-grass on the first low mesa above the stream, silent as snakes about to strike.
The prospectors awoke with the growing light. They crept forth from their blankets. Two or three rifles cracked. And then the stillness came again.
The Apaches stripped the clothing from the dead men and left them to the Arizona sun. They took away with them what loot they found. They never noticed the little heap of specimens from the outcropping. Or if they noticed it they thought it of no importance. A few handfuls of rock fragments meant nothing to them. And so the ore remained there near the bodies of the prospectors.
The old-timers go on to tell how Jim Shea came riding down the dry wash one day late in the summer with his rifle across his saddle-horn and a little troop of grim horsemen about him. Of that incident few details remain in the verbal chronicle which has come down through four decades. It is like a picture whose background has been blurred by age.
Somewhere ahead of these dusty, sunburned riders a band of Apaches were urging their wearied ponies onward under the hot sun. They herded a bunch of stolen horses before them as they fled.
The chase had begun with the beginning of the day, at Dragoon Pass. What bloodshed had preceded it is not known. But Shea and his companions were following a hot trail, eager for reprisals, cautious against ambush. As they came on down the wash the leader scanned the stony bed reading the freshening signs left 62 by the fugitives; while two who rode on either side of him watched every rock and shrub and gully which might give cover to lurking enemies.
Now, as they clattered along the arroyo’s bed, Shea suddenly drew rein. Leaning far to one side and low, after the lithe fashion of the cow-boy, he swept his hand earthward, picked up a little fragment of dark rock, straightened his body in the saddle once more, and, glancing sharply at the bit of ore, dropped it into his pocket. He repeated the movement two or three times in the next hundred yards.
Chasing Apaches––or being chased by them––was almost as much a part of life’s routine in those days as sleeping without sheets. And no one remembers how this particular affair ended. But Jim Shea kept those bits of silver ore.
Later he showed them to an assayer somewhere up on the Gila and learned their richness. Then he determined to go back and locate the ledge from which the elements had carried them away. But that project demanded a substantial grubstake, and other matters of moment were taking his attention at the time. He postponed the expedition until it was too late.
In Tucson they tell of a prospector by the name of Lewis who wandered into those foot-hills during that year, found some high-grade float, and traced it to a larger outcropping than the one down by the dry wash. But he had hardly made the marvelous discovery when he caught sight of a turbaned head above a rocky ridge about fifty yards away. He abandoned his search to seek the nearest cover. By the time he had gained the shelter a dozen Apaches were firing at him.
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