"I should say so," echoed the colonel. "What was the matter, Mr.
Daly? Whom did you seek to arrest?--and why?"
"Almost any of 'em," groaned Daly. "There were a dozen there I'd
refused passes to come again this week. They were here in defiance of
my orders, and I thought to take that girl Natzie,--she that led Lola
off,--back to her father at the agency. It would have been a good
lesson. Of course she fought and scratched. Next thing I knew a dozen
of 'em were atop of us--some water, for God's sake!--and lift me out
of this!"
Then with grave and watch-worn face, Graham came hurrying to the spot,
all the way over from Mullins's bedside at the hospital and breathing
hard. Dour indeed was the look he gave the groaning agent, now gulping
at a gourd held to his pale lips by one of the men. The policy of
Daly's predecessor had been to feather his own nest and let the Indian
shift for himself, and this had led to his final overthrow. Daly,
however, had come direct from the care of a tribe of the Pueblo
persuasion, peace-loving and tillers of the soil, meek as the Pimas
and Maricopas, natives who fawned when he frowned and cringed at the
crack of his whip. These he had successfully, and not dishonestly,
ruled, but that very experience had unfitted him for duty over the
mountain Apache, who cringed no more than did the lordly Sioux or
Cheyenne, and truckled to no man less than a tribal chief. Blakely,
the soldier, cool, fearless, and resolute, but scrupulously just, they
believed in and feared; but this new blusterer only made them laugh,
until he scandalized them by wholesale arrest and punishment. Then
their childlike merriment changed swiftly to furious and scowling
hate,--to open defiance, and finally, when he dared lay hands on a
chosen daughter of the race, to mutiny and the knife. Graham, serving
his third year in the valley, had seen the crisis coming and sought to
warn the man. But what should an army doctor know of an Apache Indian?
said Daly, and, fatuous in his own conceit, the crisis found him
unprepared.
"Go you for a stretcher," said the surgeon, after a quick look into
the livid face. "Lay him down gently there," and kneeling, busied
himself with opening a way to the wound. Out over the flats swung the
long skirmish line, picturesque in the variety of its undress, Cutler
striding vociferous in its wake, while a bugler ran himself out of
breath, far to the eastward front, to puff feeble and abortive breath
into unresponsive copper. And still the same flutter of distant,
scattering shots came drifting back from the brakes and cañons in the
rocky wilds beyond the stream. The guard still pursued and the Indians
still led, but they who knew anything well knew it could not be long
before the latter turned on the scattering chase, and Byrne strode
about, fuming with anxiety. "Thank God!" he cried, as a prodigious
clatter of hoofs, on hollow and resounding wood, told of cavalry
coming across the acequia, and Sanders galloped round the sandy
point in search of the foe--or orders. "Thank God! Here,
Sanders--pardon me, major, there isn't an instant to lose--Rush your
men right on to the front there! Spread well out, but don't fire a
shot unless attacked in force! Get those--chasing idiots and bring
them in! By God, sir, we'll have an Indian war on our hands as it is!"
And Sanders nodded and dug spurs to his troop horse, and sang out:
"Left front into line--gallop!" and the rest was lost in a cloud of
dust and the blare of cavalry trumpet.