“I want to have all that you say here go down on paper,” he addressed. “What goes down on paper never lies. A man’s memory may fail him, but the paper does not forget. I want to know from you all that has happened since I went away, to bring about this trouble between you and the white men. I want you to tell the truth without fear, and in few words.”
Old Pedro had listened attentively to the general through an ear-trumpet, for Pedro had grown quite deaf. He answered.
“When you were here, if you said a thing we knew that it was true. We cannot understand why you left us. The people who have come among us talk in one way and act in another. And I remember the other officers, too, who treated us kindly. I used to be happy; now I am all the time thinking and crying, and I say: ‘Where is old Colonel John Green, and Randall, and those other good men?’”
Alchisé spoke.
“When you left us, there were no bad Indians out. Everything was peace. But I think that all the good men must have been taken from us and only bad ones sent in. We did not mind having no rations, for we had learned to take care of ourselves. Then one day we were ordered to give up our fields and go down to the hot land of San Carlos to live. I have tried hard to help the whites, and they have put me in the guard-house. Where did you go? Why doesn’t Major Randall come back? Where is my friend Randall, the captain with the big moustache that he always pulled?”
The general was very patient with all who wished to talk. Then he took a pack-train and rode into the depths of the Black Canyon, where a number of the Apaches lived because they feared arrest.
The Apaches here, also, claimed that they had been mistreated. They had set a spy to watch the agent at San Carlos, and had caught him selling their rations. Then they had sent a man to tell the agent that he must not do this, and the man had been kept in jail for six months without any trial. They said that they had been getting only one cup of flour every seven days. One shoulder of a little cow had to last twenty persons for a week.
It was another long story, and the general promised that he would help them.
“I think there will be peace at Fort Apache and at the San Carlos,” Micky asserted, as he and Jimmie rode back after the council was over. “And if the Chiricahua will stay in Mexico and kill only Mexicans, you and I will have no fun, because the Gray Fox cannot make war in Mexico.”
“Maybe the Chiricahua will stay there.”