“Anyhow,” pursued Joe, “this sort o’ thing won’t hang over, long. They told me at Lowell (Camp Lowell, near Tucson, he meant) that orders have been received from headquarters to be ready to take the trail on short notice, an’ that the old man (who was General Crook) is puttin’ on his war-paint and havin’ that mule ’Pache, o’ his, re-shod, four squar’.”
At the instant, while Joe was speaking in the ranch yard, a sudden high chorus of shrill grief sounded, down the road to Camp Grant. Up the course of the sandy San Pedro Valley wended a slow little procession, of men and women afoot and on mules.
The grief immediately spread to the ranch, where the Mexican women began to run wildly, and shriek, and tear their hair. Mrs. Vasquez, who was Francisco’s mother, rushed by, to meet the procession.
“Mi niño! Ay, mi niño!” she wailed. “My little boy! Oh, my little boy!”
How did she know? Joe Felmer gaped, puzzled; and a cold fear seized Jimmie’s thumping heart.
Upon the seat of a two-wheeled, creaking cart in the midst of the procession Francisco’s father, Domingo Vasquez, was sitting and holding in his arms something wrapped in a blanket. He held it very tightly.
Yes, it was poor little Francisco, killed by an Apache lance-thrust. Joe Felmer scarcely could get the story, amid all that shrieking and confusion; but finally he and Jimmie learned from Domingo what had happened.
“I take him with me in my cart to Camp Grant this morning,” said Domingo, in Mexican-Spanish, “while I cut wood along the Arivaipa, for the fort. He visits with people I know, and I do not see him. When I go to the fort to get him and come home, he is not there. They say he has left to find me. We hunt a long time, and we call, and he does not answer. And then, next, they tell me he is found, and I see them bringing him. Just a little way off the trail up the Arivaipa from the fort somebody had found him, behind a cactus there; and he was dead by an Apache lance. Why should anybody kill my little boy—my niño, my muchachito!—my little Francisco who never harmed?”
Why, indeed? Francisco was only a gay, innocent little Mexican boy, alone, and too young to be an enemy. The murder had been done at a turn of the trail within rifle-shot from the fort. A party of Chief Chuntz’s Tontos and Yavapais had been sneaking around the post and the agency, pretending that they were ready to come in. Old Santos insisted that the murderer was a Chuntz warrior, if not Chuntz himself.
Santos was home again, after his trip east with General Howard. He was filled with admiration of the ways of the white people. The general had given him a New Testament, which he could not read, of course, but which he placed under his head, every night, when he slept.