“Perhaps you are right,” said Geronimo, sadly. “He is a wicked God, but his medicine is stronger than the medicine of Usen.”
“I,” said Shoz-Dijiji, “shall pray always to the god of my fathers. I want nothing of the pindah-lickoyee or their god. I hate them all.”
A brave, moving at an easy run, approached the camp and stopped before Geronimo.
“Soldiers are coming,” he said. “Their scouts have followed the tracks of Shoz-Dijiji and Gian-nah-tah.”
“Only Apaches could trail us,” said Geronimo. “If our brothers had remained loyal and taken the war trail with us the pindah-lickoyee could not conquer us in a thousand rains.”
“There is a place where we can meet them,” said the brave who had brought the word, “and stop them.”
“I know,” replied Geronimo. He called four warriors to him. “Take the women and the boys,” he said, “and cross over the summit to the burned pine by the first water. Those of us who live will join you there after the battle.”
Stripped to breech-cloth and moccasins, eighteen painted savages filed silently through the rough mountains. A scout preceded them. Behind Geronimo walked the Apache Devil, his blue face banded with white. Stern, grim, terrible men these—hunted as beasts are hunted, retaliating as only a cornered beast retaliates—asking no quarter and giving none.
Equipped by civilization with the best of weapons and plenty of ammunition and by nature with high intelligence, courage, and shrewdness they had every advantage except that of numbers over any enemy that might take the field against them.
They stopped the ——th Cavalry that day as they had stopped other troops before and without the loss of a man, and with the coming of night had vanished among the rocks of their beloved mountains and rejoined their women in the new camp by the burned pine at the first water beyond the summit.