While getting ready to start for White Oaks next morning one of the eight or ten, mexicans, who were sitting on the fence sunning themselves, came to me, and told me of a near cut to the "Oaks," by taking an old Indian trail over the White Mountains, and advised me to take that route as I could save at least twenty miles, it being forty around by the road.
Mr. Nesbeth spoke up and said it would be better for me to travel on the road, even if it was further, as I might experience some difficulty in finding the old Indian trail, etc.
The "Greaser" then offered me his service, saying that he would go and put me on the trail so that it would be impossible for me to miss my way. I agreed, so he mounted a pony and we rode east up a rough canyon.
A ride of about five miles brought us to the almost obliterated trail. It lead up an awful brushy and rocky canyon towards the snowy crags of the White Mountain range.
About an hour after bidding the "Greaser" adieu, I came to where the trail made a short curve to the left, but I could tell from the lay of the ground that, by keeping straight ahead, I would strike it again. So I left it, and luckily for me that I did, for there was some one laying for me not far from there.
I hadn't gone but a rod or two when bang! bang! bang! went three shots in quick succession, not over fifty yards to the left; and at the same time my mule gave a lunge forward, on the ice-covered stones, and fell broad-side, throwing me over a precipice about eight feet to the bottom. My winchester and pistol both were hanging to the saddle-horn, but I managed to grab and pull the latter out of the scabbard as I went off, and took it with me.
The first thing I done on striking bottom was to hunt a hole. I found a nice little nook between two boulders and lay there with cocked pistol, expecting every second to see three Indians or "Greasers" peep over the ledge on the hunt for a dead "Gringo"—as the mexicans call an American.
After waiting a few minutes I became impatient and crawled on top of a small knoll and, on looking in the direction the shooting had come from, I got a faint glimpse of what I took to be two half-stooped human forms retreating, through the pinyon brush, at a lively gait. Suffice it to say I found my mule standing in a grove of trees, with his front feet fastened in the bridle-reins, about two hundred yards from where he fell. And between his forelegs, on the ground was a small pool of sparkling red blood, which had dripped from a slight bullet wound in his breast.
On examination I found that one bullet had cut a groove in the hind tree of my saddle, and another had plowed through a pair of blankets tied behind the saddle. I arrived in the Oaks, on my almost broken-down mule about dark that night, after an absence of nearly two weeks.