He rode to the edge of the plain and from the lowlands up the first slopes of talus at the mouth of a long, steep-walled cañon. He pressed his horse on up the narrow gorge. On either side the cliffs loomed above him; in places they were so close together that he could have tossed a pebble from one to the other. There was no sign of life; no sound, no movement.
But this tall lean rider knew that somewhere among those granite pinnacles which stood out against the sky-line before him and on either side, scores of venomous black eyes were watching him. He knew that for every pair of eyes there was a rifle; and that many a crooked brown finger was fairly itching to press the trigger.
Thus he rode his sweating pony up and up where the gorge wound toward the summit, up and up until he reached the nests of enormous granite boulders which hang seemingly poised between the heavens and the flat plain beneath. And finally he saw before him the lodges made of bended bushes with skins and blankets spread over their curved sides. He reined in his horse, dismounted, and walked into the camp of the renegades.
Cochise was sitting in his lodge, which was but a bare shelter from the sun’s rays––a number of bushes bound together at their tops formed the ribs for a haphazard sort of tent made of outspread skins,––and whether he was awaiting this visit no man knows. For the war-chief showed no sign of surprise or of welcome when Captain Jeffords entered the place. But when the tall white man had seated himself upon the skins which covered the dry earth and announced his purpose, Cochise betrayed astonishment.
“I have come here,” Jeffords said with the 206 deliberation which one must use when he is talking with an Indian, “to see you, to know you better, and to talk over certain matters with you. I will stay here two days or maybe three; and while I remain––to show my good faith––one of your squaws may keep my weapons.” With which he laid aside his rifle and revolver.
After a silence whose length would have been disconcerting to any other than an old-timer owning a knowledge of the Indian ways, Cochise called a squaw, who picked up the firearms at his bidding and took them away with her. Then these two men of parts settled down to talk business.
It took them two days and two nights, for Jeffords was careful not to crowd matters in the slightest, hanging to the savage custom of long silences and few words at a time between them. As the hours went on he sat there patiently listening to the war-chief recounting at great length his experiences with the white men, reciting the stories of bad faith and broken compacts; and when these recitals were finished he continued to sit in silence for long intervals, before he resumed his own arguments.
Thus the talk went on in the little brush shelter during the hot days and the cool evenings; and what it all came to was this:
Jeffords said that this war between Cochise and the soldiers was not his war. It was, he maintained, no business of his excepting when the officers who carried the authority of the great father in Washington, bade him to do their bidding and act as a guide or scout. Otherwise, why should he take up his good time and risk 207 his life in fighting a people against whom he held no personal grudge?