"Why do you think I followed you to this place where you and your people have fled?" Geronimo queried. "I will not live with the other Apaches in that stinking country called the San Carlos Reservation which the white men saw fit to give them. And there are too many soldiers being stationed in Arizona. I knew that I and those few who came with me could not hope to fight them. It is good here."
"It is good here," Victorio agreed. "But only because the white soldiers are so stupid. In Arizona, every group of soldiers starting on an Apache trail had many mules to carry provisions. Thus they were able to stay on the trail for many days or even weeks. Here in New Mexico, each soldier has only his own horse. When they set out to pursue us, they may continue only until their horses are too weary to go on. Then the soldiers must turn back."
"There is small need to fret about them," Geronimo said confidently. "For many years we have run away from all the soldiers in Arizona and New Mexico too. They will not catch us now."
Victorio said, "It is not the soldiers who worry me, but a white man who is now in charge of the San Carlos Reservation. His name is John Clum, and he is no more like the ordinary white man who comes to oversee Indians than a jack rabbit is like an elk. He has treated the Apaches fairly, and as a result they have grown to respect him. Some of the bravest and best Apache warriors have joined his Indian police force. And he has vowed to put you and me, whom he calls renegades, on the reservation too."
"Let him talk," muttered Geronimo. "One cannot catch us with words."
He did not know that even as he spoke, John Clum and a number of his most fearless and sharpest-shooting Indian police were on their way to the camp. They had left San Carlos a week earlier for the sole purpose of capturing these two men and their followers.
For more than a year the Apaches had remained unmolested in this isolated camp in New Mexico. When they went to bed that night, they scarcely bothered to post a sentry.
In the first light of early morning John Clum and his Indian police closed in. Taken wholly by surprise, the Apaches could do nothing but surrender.