Through Apache Land

by Edward Sylvester Ellis

"Yes, I can read that," Tom growled, still drifting with the current. "That ere redskin is signalin' to some other scamp, and it's all about me. It says that I'm on the river somewhere, and a lookout must be kept for me."

Such was the fact. The Indian who swayed the torch meant thereby to appraise some confederate that the scout who had dared to penetrate such a distance into their country, and to unearth their most important secrets, was seeking to make his way down the Rio Gila and out of their country again. This much said the torch in language that could not be mistaken. Although it added no more, yet the sequence was inevitable, and Tom needed no one to apprise him that the river both above and below him was closely watched, and that he was in the greatest peril of his life. Being entirely shrouded in shadow, he could not see the moon, which rode high in the sky, scarcely touched by a floating cloud.

"I wish the moon would go out of sight altogether," he said to himself, as he viewed the clear sky. "I'd like to see it as black as a wolf's mouth, and then I'd teach these scamps somethin'; but there's too much confounded moonlight layin' loose for a chap to show any scientific tricks."

The fact that a redskin had indulged in signaling suggested that there must be some one to whom he had signaled, and the hunter devoted himself to learning where the second Apache was located.

"As near as I kin calc'late, the chap must be on this side of the stream, and purty close to where I'm rockin' in the cradle of the deep this very minute."

He now moved his paddle slightly—just enough to hold the boat motionless while he looked and listened. The stillness was profound; not even the soft sighing of the wind reaching his ears. He had peered around in the gloom only a few minutes when he discerned the reply to the signal already described, and so close that he was startled. Scarcely fifty feet below him, and on the edge of the bluff, several yards in height, a light flashed into view. A second glance showed him that it was a flaming torch held in the hand of an Indian, who began whirling it around his head with a swiftness that made it seem like a revolving wheel of fire. The rapid motion of the torch, as the reader may infer, caused an equally rapid increase of the flame upon it, so that it revealed the Indian himself; and the hunter, as he looked toward it, saw the figure of the warrior standing like some pyrotechnist in the center of his own display.

A better target could not have been asked, and Tom, quick as thought, raised his rifle and sighted it; but with his finger upon the trigger, he refrained, lowered the piece and shook his head, muttering as he did so:

"He deserves it, and I'd like to give it to him, but it won't do. They'd know what the rifle-crack meant, and I'd have a hornet's nest about my head quick as lightnin'."

Tom was not certain of the meaning of the exhibition he had just seen, but believed that it was intended as a mere reply to the other—the same as if the Apache had shouted "All right!" in response to the notification. The Indian must have circled the torch in this manner for more than a score of times, when he threw it from his hand into the river, where it fell with a hiss, and was instantly extinguished.

The scout was in a quandary. If he continued down stream he must pass directly beneath the spot where his foe was standing, and the shadow was by no means dense enough to make it possible for him to escape observation. He was confident, however, that if he could change places with the warrior, he could discern the canoe without any closer approach. He was at a disadvantage, for the bluff was perfectly perpendicular and so high that he could not reach the ground above without retreating up the river for at least a quarter of a mile, where the bluff was depressed enough to permit him to draw himself upward upon it. Had the bank been low and wooded, it would have been the easiest matter in the world to have shoved the canoe into the shelter, or to have circumvented the Indian by lifting it bodily from the water and going around him, and striking the river again below. But Tom hesitated only a few minutes. He was anxious to get forward, for delay was dangerous and he felt annoyed at the manner in which he was dogged.