“Four of my young men will take you to a good place,” Cochise told him, “and after the third day they will bring you back.”
On the advice of Jeffords this course of action was agreed to; and four Apaches took General Howard down into the valley as far as the point where the Sulphur Springs ranch buildings now stand.
Jeffords and the aide bided here on the heights with the Indians. And on the second day, true to Cochise’s prophecy, a band of renegades came riding hard up the gorge. The spot where the Indians were encamped was a saddle at the summit, some hundreds of feet lower than the adjoining ridges. Now as the fugitive warriors threw themselves from their lathered ponies, announcing that two troops of cavalry were close behind them, the aide of General Howard witnessed one of those spectacles which are easier to tell than to believe.
With the announcement of this emergency, the camp moved. In the same time that it takes to say the foregoing sentence, it moved––men, women, children, and every bit of impedimenta. It was like one of those magic transformations of which we used to read in fairy-tales when we were children.
One moment the Apaches were squatting among their lodges; and in the next moment people and goods and wickiups were gone; the place was bare.
Every warrior and squaw and child seized what objects were nearest at hand, overlooking none, and scampered off with them. Within a few minutes of the arrival of the fugitives, the entire band was scattered among the boulders and pinnacles on the higher portion of the ridge; Cochise was disposing his warriors to the best advantage to repel the attack.
But the cavalry made no advance beyond the cañon mouth, and there was no fight. When General Howard returned at the end of the next day he saw the manner in which the war-chief had deployed his men and was struck with admiration. No general, he 213 said in telling of the incident afterward, no matter how highly schooled in the arts of modern warfare, could have disposed of his forces to better advantage than this savage had done.
Then General Howard, his aide, and Captain Jeffords were given one of those primitive lodges and settled down here among the lofty heights of Cochise’s stronghold, isolated from all white men, surrounded by the most bloodthirsty savages in America, rubbing elbows with naked warriors who had spent the years of their manhood perfecting themselves in the fine arts of ambush and murder.
Cochise saw to it that they were well supplied with robes and blankets; by his orders they were feasted as became ambassadors; and General Howard ate with a relish one evening a stew which he afterward learned was made from the meat of a fat half-grown colt.