Geronimo responded like an obedient dog. He felt no grief, no shock, no pain, for he was too numbed to feel anything. He knew he must follow only because he had been told that he must.
By sunrise the Apaches were many miles from the scene of tragedy. Mangus Coloradus had led them over the roughest and rockiest places. They had waded streams wherever streams flowed and done everything possible to hide their trail.
At last Mangus Coloradus called a halt and sent some out to hunt while he told others to build a smokeless fire from dead wood. One by one, the hunters returned. Since a shot from a gun would have attracted attention, the game had been brought down with thrown rocks or knives. Their bag consisted of some jack rabbits and a crippled peccary. They ate, rested, and went on.
Geronimo remembered nothing of the flight. On reaching the village, he went first to his mother's wickiup. He entered, but at once ducked out again and sought his own house. Slowly the fogs faded from his brain. He discovered that he still carried the basket of beads for which he had traded half a pouch of gold in Kas-Kai-Ya.
He had not realized, that night while the thin moon lighted the scene of the massacre, that the beloved people upon whom he looked were dead. Nor had he understood since. But he knew it now.
Geronimo plunged into his wickiup and sought his store of weapons. Shotguns, rifles, muskets, powder, shot, knives, hatchets, lances, bows, and arrows were carried a safe distance from the wickiup and put carefully down. The basket of beads was placed near them.
Then Geronimo strode to a nearby fire. Catching up a burning brand, he fired the wickiup he had shared with Alope, then cast the brand against his mother's house. He turned his back on the burning wickiups. Like his old life, they would soon be ashes. But there would be a new life, he told himself. A life of revenge!
Pedro Gonzalez was attracted to the fires, and Geronimo asked him, "Do you have weapons?"
"Bow and arrows, a knife, a lance, a hatchet."
Geronimo indicated his own store. "Choose what you will."