"The presence at this juncture of Lieutenant Willett, aide-de-camp to the department commander, was of great value and importance, and I trust that his decision to remain may meet approval. On the other hand, it is with regret that I am constrained to express my disapproval of the action of Lieutenant Harris, commanding scouts, who left the post with his men immediately after the alarm and without conference with me; was only overtaken by Lieutenant Willett after going several miles, and, when informed of my instructions, practically refused to be guided by them. Persuading a few of the scouts to follow him, he left the detachment, in spite of Lieutenant Willett's remonstrance, and started in pursuit of the marauders. As these must largely outnumber him, it is not only impossible that he should rescue the captives, but more than probable he has paid for his rashness with his life."
CHAPTER VIII.
"The Gray Fox" had but just received his promotion to the star, jumping every colonel in the army. He had been doing mighty work among the recalcitrant Apaches at a time when other commanders were having hard luck in their respective fields—one, indeed, forfeiting his own honored and valued life through heeding the sophistries of the Peace Commissioners rather than the appeals of officers and men who long had known the Modocs. For long years the warriors of the Arizona deserts and mountains had bidden defiance to the methods of department commanders who fought them from their desks at Drum Barracks, or the Occidental, but George Crook came from years of successful campaigning after other tribes, and in person led his troopers to the scene of action. One after another the heads of noted chiefs were bowed, or laid, at his feet. The pioneers, the settlers, the ranchmen and miners took heart and hope again, and the marauders to the mountains. Then came "our friends the enemy," from the far East, with petition and prayer. Suspension of hostilities, on part of the troops at least, was ordered, while most excellently pious emissaries arrived inviting the warriors to come in, to be reasoned with, taught the error of their ways and persuaded to promise to be good. The astute Apache had no objection to such proceedings. He was certainly willing to have the soldier quit fighting, just as willing to come and hear exhortation and prayer, when coupled with presents and plenty to eat; most Indians would be. So the new general stepped aside, as ordered, and left the elders a fair field. "The Gray Fox" went hunting bear and deer, and while the Apache chieftains went down to the Gila to reap what they could from the lavish hands of the good and the gentle, their young men swooped on the stage roads and scattered ranches, and made hay after their own fashion while shone the sun of peace and promise. So happened it along the Verde and Salado that the Apache came down like the wolf on the fold, and so Harris had come up from the Southern Sierra, and 'Tonio had sworn that, all signs to the contrary notwithstanding, his people were not, as the agent declared, the pillagers and pirates. "Apache-Mohave? No! No!!"
"The Gray Fox" had ventured to give his views to the War Department, which in turn had ventured to express itself to the Secretary of the Interior. But let us lose no time in following further. The Eastern press, and such of the Eastern public as had any leisure to devote to the subject, persisted in looking upon Indian affairs from the viewpoint and remoteness of Boston, where once upon a time Miles Standish and our Puritan forbears handled such matters in a manner anything but Puritanical. Nothing was left to the military arm of the Government but temporary submission, so, as has been said, "the Gray Fox" went off on a hunt for bear, mountain lions, and such big game as was reported to be awaiting him toward the Grand Cañon to the north. An adjutant-general of the old school was left in charge of the desk and the department, and all on a sudden found that while Peace and its commissioners held their sway far to the south, grim-visaged War had burst upon the northward valleys, and chaos had come again.
The couriers bearing Archer's report to Prescott found others, similarly burdened, from the upper reservation, from Camp Sandy, and even from points to the west and south of department head-quarters, all telling of death and depredation. So, while the chief of staff ruefully digested these tidings at the office, the couriers proceeded to have a time in town, to the end that, when replies and instructions were in readiness to be sent out, only two of the six were in shape to take them, and Archer's runner—one of the frontier scouts, half Mexican, half Apache—was one of the two.
Now, the chief of staff had been nearly three years in Arizona, had served in similar capacity to predecessors of "the Gray Fox," and naturally thought he understood the Apache, and the situation, far better than did his new commander, and the fact that he had allowed this conviction to be known had led to a degree of official friction between himself and the one aide-de-camp left that was fast verging on the personal. Bright, almost invariably the companion of the general in his journeyings, was even now with him, lost in the mountains ninety miles in one direction; Willett, the newly appointed aide-de-camp, was with the commander of Camp Almy, ninety miles away in another, while black-bearded Wickham stood alone at Prescott. Wickham had not been consulted when Willett was sent with confidential instructions to Almy. Wickham would have disapproved, and the chief of staff knew it. Wickham had to be shown Archer's despatch, though the adjutant-general would gladly have concealed it, and now, in chagrin at the outcome of affairs at Almy, and in consternation at the ebullition all around him, the adjutant-general was quite at a loss what to do. Wickham, if asked, would have said at once, "Send for General Crook," but that would be confession that he, the experienced, did not know how to handle the situation. So again he took no counsel with Wickham, but issued instructions in the name of the department commander and ordered them carried out forthwith.
Then it transpired that only two couriers were fit to go. Thereupon, the commanding officer of the one cavalry troop at the post was ordered to detail three non-commissioned officers, with a brace of troopers apiece, as bearers of despatches to Date Creek, Wickenberg, Sandy and the reservation, while Sanchez, the Mexican-Apache Mercury, was ordered to hasten back to Almy by way of the Mazatzal. It was then but ten a.m., and to the annoyance of the adjutant-general, Sanchez shook his black mane and said something that sounded like hasta la noche—he wouldn't start till night. Asked why, the interpreter said he feared Apache Tontos, and being assured by the adjutant-general that no Tonto could be west of the Verde, intimated his conviction of the officer's misinformation by the only sign he knew as bearing on the matter—that of the forked tongue, which called for no interpreter, as it concisely said, You lie. Sanchez meant neither insult nor insolence, but the adjutant-general regarded it as both, ordered another sergeant and two men got ready at once to ride to Almy, and bade the interpreter take Sanchez to the post guard-house and turn him over for discipline to the officer of the day. The sergeant started forty minutes later, with his two men at his back, and just thirty-five minutes behind Sanchez, who left the station on the spur of the moment, and the interpreter with a cleft weasand. It is a mistake for one man to attempt the incarceration of an armed half-blood of the Indian race. Sanchez started in the lead, afoot, and, in spite of his fear of Tontos, kept it all the way to the Mazatzal, where, as was later learned, he abandoned the paths of rectitude and the trail to Almy, and joining a party of twenty young renegades, complacently watched the coming of that sergeant and detachment from behind the sheltering bowlders of Dead Man's Cañon, and thus it happened that the orders Archer had been expecting three long days and nights were destined never to get to him.
It was this situation he had been puzzling over when at ten p.m. the officer of the day came in to say that new signal fires in the east were now being answered by others in the west, away over in the Mazatzal, and the general went forth to the northern edge of the "bench" to have a good look at them, wishing very much he had Stannard or Turner or "Capitan Chiquito"—little Harris—to help him guess their meaning.
But Stannard, with his sturdy troop, was still far afield, scouting the fastnesses of the Mogollon in hopes still of overtaking the marauding band that had ruined Bennett's ranch, murdered its owner, and borne away into the wilds two helpless little settlers for whom a half-crazed, heart-broken woman at Almy was wailing night and day. Turner, following another route and clew, was exploring the Sierra Ancha south of Tonto Creek, and Lieutenant Harris, in fever and torment, was occupying an airy room in the post surgeon's quarters, the object of Bentley's ceaseless care, and of deep solicitude on part of the entire garrison.
Borne in the arms of Stannard's men, poor young Mrs. Bennett, raving, had been carried back to the ruins, and thence by ambulance to the post. There now she lay with her reason almost gone, nursed by the hospital steward's wife, and visited frequently by three gentle women, whose hearts were wrung at sight of her grief. Mrs. Stannard sometimes spent hours in the effort to soothe and comfort her. Mrs. Archer was hardly less assiduous, but was beginning now to have anxieties of her own. Lilian, her beloved daughter, fancy free, as the mother had reason to know, up to the time of their coming to this far-away, out-of-the-way station, seemed dangerously near the point of losing her heart to that very attractive and presentable fellow, Willett, the aide-de-camp, and Mrs. Archer did not half like it.