The grip of the Apache who held Jimmie had slackened. Jimmie managed to squirm ’round enough to look up into the Apache’s face. In return he got a grin, and two or three Apache words that said: “Good boy. No fear.” These were common words with the “tame” Apaches who sometimes came into Camp Grant or to Joe Felmer’s little ranch near by, so Jimmie understood.
The country grew rougher and wilder and higher. By the sun Jimmie knew that the course was generally eastward, and he guessed that these were Chiricahua Apaches.
The Apache Indians, as almost anybody in Arizona could say off-hand, were divided into the Chiricahuas and the Pinals and the Arivaipas and the Coyotes and the White Mountains and the Apache-Mohaves and the Apache-Yumas and the Tontos and the Mogollons, and the Warm Spring Apaches and the Mimbres (of New Mexico), and the Jicarillas (Heek-ah-ree-yahs) or Basket Apaches, who never came into Arizona; and so forth.
The Tontos and Pinals, who were outlaws, and the Chiricahuas (Chee-ree-cah-wahs), who were hard, thorough fighters, seemed to give the most trouble. The Chiricahuas lived in the mountains of southern Arizona and of northern Mexico.
The pines and cedars of the higher country were reached before dusk. Not a tenth of the sheep had come this far. The most of them had been left to die from heat and exhaustion. Now having passed through another of their favorite narrow canyons, the Apaches halted, at dark, to camp beside a trickle of water in a rocky little basin surrounded by crags and timber.
This night Jimmie was forced to lie between two Apache warriors, the one who had captured him, and a comrade; and he fitted so closely that if he moved he would waken them. It was an uncomfortable bed, there under a thin dirty strip of blanket, limited by those greasy, warm bodies, and he was afraid to stir. But he was so tired that he slept, anyway.
Very early in the morning the camp roused again. Apaches when on a raid or when pursued were supposed to travel on only one meal a day and with only three hours’ rest out of the twenty-four. So now on and on and on, through all kinds of rough country they hastened, at steady gait and speaking rarely—Jimmie riding a bareback horse.
In late afternoon they halted on the rim of a valley so deep and wide that it was veiled in bluish-purple haze. On a rocky point three of the Apaches started a fire of dried grass, and sent up a smoke signal by heaping pitchy pine cones upon the blaze.
Chewing twigs and sucking pebbles to keep their mouths wet, the Apaches, talking together and watching, waited, until a long distance across the valley, whose brushy sides were thickly grown with the mescal, or century plant cactuses, blooming in round stalks twenty feet tall, a smoke column answered.
The Apaches tending to their own fire fed more pine cones to it, and two of them rapidly clapped a saddle-blanket on and off the smoke, and broke it into puffs. The smoke column across the valley puffed in reply.