General Crook had ridden back to Fort Whipple, on his mule “Apache,” and General Howard had left in the ambulance driven by “Dismal Jeems,” for Camp Apache and the White Mountain reservation.
He had another good scheme. He was collecting Indians from among the tribes, to take them with him to Washington and the Great White Father, that they might understand how many and powerful the white people were.
Old Santos had agreed to go, for the Arivaipas. The Pimas were sending their teacher, the Reverend Mr. Cook, and Louis the interpreter, and the young chief Antonito. The Papagos were sending their chief, Ascencion. The Date Creek Apache-Mohaves or Yavapais were sending Charlie and José.
Concepcion Equierre went from the Arivaipa agency, to translate Apache.
The general expected to get some of the Sierra Blanca or White Mountain Apaches, at the Camp Apache reservation; and to invite the Chiricahuas, also. He arrived safely at Camp Apache, and there added to his party Chiefs Miguel of the one eye, Pedro and Es-ki-tis-tsla; but he failed to find any Chiricahuas.
So he proceeded by wagon and mule, without them.
“I’d shorely like to see those Injuns’ faces when the hull party strikes the railroad at Santy Fee!” chuckled Jack Long. “They’ll think the Old Nick is to tow ’em with his tail up.”
For Santa Fe of New Mexico Territory was the nearest point east of Camp Grant reached by a railroad.
“What does a railroad look like, Jeem?” queried little Francisco, hearing the talk.
Jimmie himself had not seen a railroad for several years, but he remembered, and he tried to explain.
“It’s two lines of iron, like wagon-wheel tracks, reaching miles and miles, chico,” he said. “And on them roll fine wagons, joined together and filled with people, and drawn by a—did you ever hear about boats, chico? Those boats that sail up and down the Colorado River, and make a big noise?”
Francisco eagerly nodded.
“My father has a brother who saw one.”
“Well, the thing that hauls the wagons is a steamboat on land. It runs without horses; and it runs so fast that it could go from here to Tucson, fifty-five miles, in two hours.”
Francisco crossed himself.
“I would be afraid, Jeem,” he quavered.
Poor little Francisco! He was to meet a sad fate.
But, first, June and July passed quietly at Camp Grant. From Fort Whipple General Crook continued to keep scouting detachments and pack-trains moving. The various posts were strengthened by troops and supplies. The greater portion of the Fifth Cavalry was in Arizona, with some troops of the First Cavalry, and part of the Twelfth Infantry and of the Twenty-third Infantry—the general’s regiment. The Twenty-first Infantry and most of the Third Cavalry had gone out.
The general was getting ready. According to the officers of the Fifth Cavalry and the Twenty-third Infantry at Camp Grant, the President had resolved that if the Peace Policy in Arizona did not persuade the Indians to settle down within a year, General Crook should be ordered to take matters over.
The year would be up this September.
Then, in August, things “broke wide open,” as Joe Felmer expressed it.
General Crook just escaped being assassinated by the Yavapais at Date Creek, where he had gone for a talk. He had angered them by arresting several of them for the murder of Engineer Loring and others, in the Wickenburg stage massacre. He had been told that they were planning to kill him, but he went anyway.
They did try to shoot him, in the council. Lieutenant Ross knocked up the arm of the Indian who fired first, there was an all-round tussle, Hank Hewitt the packer seized one Indian by both ears and broke his head against a rock, a part of the Yavapais were killed or imprisoned, and the rest fought their way into the mountains.
The Tonto Basin Apaches—Tontos and Yavapais both—were attacking ranches and mines south of Prescott. Their worst chiefs were Chuntz, and Delt-che (Delt-shay) or Red Ant (the Yavapais were known as Red Ant people), and Cha-li-pun, the Buckskin-colored Hat.
And on the road only thirty miles south of Tucson the Chiricahuas killed gallant young Lieutenant Reid Stewart, the “shave tail” who had been out of West Point two months, and Corporal Black, while the two were riding in a buck-board wagon up from Fort Crittenden, for Tucson.
“An’ I hear now they’ve got Bob Whitney, at last,” one day reported Joe Felmer, on return from Tucson. “Yep; shot out his brains while he an’ Cap’n Gerald Russell o’ the Third were waterin’ their hosses in the place called Cochise’s Stronghold of the Dragoon Mountains, between Tucson an’ Bowie.”
Bob Whitney had been known as the handsomest guide and scout in Arizona.
“Anyhow,” pursued Joe, “this sort o’ thing won’t hang over, long. They told me at Lowell (Camp Lowell, near Tucson, he meant) that orders have been received from headquarters to be ready to take the trail on short notice, an’ that the old man (who was General Crook) is puttin’ on his war-paint and havin’ that mule ’Pache, o’ his, re-shod, four squar’.”
At the instant, while Joe was speaking in the ranch yard, a sudden high chorus of shrill grief sounded, down the road to Camp Grant. Up the course of the sandy San Pedro Valley wended a slow little procession, of men and women afoot and on mules.
The grief immediately spread to the ranch, where the Mexican women began to run wildly, and shriek, and tear their hair. Mrs. Vasquez, who was Francisco’s mother, rushed by, to meet the procession.
“Mi niño! Ay, mi niño!” she wailed. “My little boy! Oh, my little boy!”
How did she know? Joe Felmer gaped, puzzled; and a cold fear seized Jimmie’s thumping heart.
Upon the seat of a two-wheeled, creaking cart in the midst of the procession Francisco’s father, Domingo Vasquez, was sitting and holding in his arms something wrapped in a blanket. He held it very tightly.
Yes, it was poor little Francisco, killed by an Apache lance-thrust. Joe Felmer scarcely could get the story, amid all that shrieking and confusion; but finally he and Jimmie learned from Domingo what had happened.
“I take him with me in my cart to Camp Grant this morning,” said Domingo, in Mexican-Spanish, “while I cut wood along the Arivaipa, for the fort. He visits with people I know, and I do not see him. When I go to the fort to get him and come home, he is not there. They say he has left to find me. We hunt a long time, and we call, and he does not answer. And then, next, they tell me he is found, and I see them bringing him. Just a little way off the trail up the Arivaipa from the fort somebody had found him, behind a cactus there; and he was dead by an Apache lance. Why should anybody kill my little boy—my niño, my muchachito!—my little Francisco who never harmed?”
Why, indeed? Francisco was only a gay, innocent little Mexican boy, alone, and too young to be an enemy. The murder had been done at a turn of the trail within rifle-shot from the fort. A party of Chief Chuntz’s Tontos and Yavapais had been sneaking around the post and the agency, pretending that they were ready to come in. Old Santos insisted that the murderer was a Chuntz warrior, if not Chuntz himself.
Santos was home again, after his trip east with General Howard. He was filled with admiration of the ways of the white people. The general had given him a New Testament, which he could not read, of course, but which he placed under his head, every night, when he slept.
“Chuntz is bad,” sympathized Santos, to Jimmie. “He is bad and so are his men. All those Tonto and Yavapai are bad at heart. To kill a boy is not Christian. The only way to make those Tonto and Yavapai good is to hunt them down. Cluke, the man with the brown clothes, must go out after them, and after the Chiricahua, too. I have told the Arivaipa what I have seen among the white men. The white men are many and very rich, and we will live like them if they do not try to make us believe that the earth is round. General Howard started to tell me that the earth is round, but I answered that he and I are too great chiefs, to be such fools as that!”
Little Francisco was laid away at the ranch. For some time Jimmie felt sad and lonely. Francisco had been his chum. The end was cruel and horrible.
So he was mighty glad when Joe sent him out with old Jack Long, to help take a pack-train and bunch of cavalry horses clear to Camp Bowie, by way of Tucson.
“An’, b’gosh, you’d better hustle back,” warned Joe. “That Chuntz is a-goin’ to be made to pay for his boy killin’, as soon as thar’s snow on the peaks. The old man’s only waitin’ till winter sets in.”
It seemed high time that something was done. In the past twelve months of Peace Policy over forty Americans and Mexicans of Arizona had been killed by the Apaches, sixteen wounded, and five hundred and fifty cattle stolen.