“Then I said to General Miles: ‘All the officers that have been in charge of the Indians have talked that way, and it sounds like a story to me; I hardly believe you.’
“ ‘This time,’ he said, ‘it is the truth,’ and he swept a spot of ground clear with his hand and said: ‘Your past deeds shall be wiped out like this, and you will start a new life.’
“All this talk was translated from English into Spanish and from Spanish into Apache. It took a long time. Perhaps the interpreters did not make any mistakes. I do not know.”
“Are you going to live on the reservation at San Carlos?” asked Shoz-Dijiji.
“No. They are going to send us out of Arizona because they say that the white men whose families and friends we have killed would always be making a lot of trouble for us, that they would try to kill us.”
“Where are they going to send you?”
“To Fort Marion in a country called Florida.” The old man bowed his head. Could it be that there were tears in those cold blue eyes?
Shoz-Dijiji placed a hand on his father’s shoulder. “I know now that I shall never see you again,” he said. “The pindah-lickoyee, who have never kept a promise that they have made to the Shis-Inday, will not keep this one. When you have laid down your arms they will kill you, as they killed Mangas Colorado.
“It is not too late even now to turn back,” continued the young man. “We have ponies, we have arms, we have ammunition; and there are places in the mountains of Sonora where a few men could elude the pindah-lickoyee forever. Do not let them take you to a strange country where they will either kill you or make a slave of you.”
Geronimo shook his head. “No, my son,” he said, “that cannot be. The war chief of the pindah-lickoyee and the war chief of all the Apaches stood between his troopers and my warriors. We placed a large stone on the blanket before us. Our treaty was made by this stone, and it was to last until the stone should crumble to dust. So we made the treaty and bound each other with an oath. Geronimo will keep that treaty.”