“It is. I’m sorry I can give no better advice. There’s no alternative if we wish to live.”
“To lose everything,” puts in the junior partner, “goods, animals, machinery! That would be a terrible calamity. Surely, Señor Vicente, we can defend the camp; our people are all well armed.”
“Impossible, Don Roberto; impossible were they ever so well armed. From what I could make out of the Indian party it numbers hundreds to our tens, sufficient of them to surround us on every side. And even if we could keep them off during daylight, at night they’d crawl close enough to set the camp on fire. Wagons, tilts, every stick and stitch of them are dry as tinder; the very pack-saddles would be ablaze with the first spark that fell on them.”
“But how know we that these Indians are hostile? After all, it may be some friendly band; perhaps Opatas?”
“No!” exclaims the gambusino impatiently. “I saw enough to know they’re not Opatas, nor mansos of any kind; enough to be sure they’re bravos, and almost sure, Apaches.”
“Apaches!” echo several voices in the surrounding, in tones proclaiming the dread with which this name inspires the heart of every Sonoreno. Every man present feels a creeping sensation in the skin of his head, as though the scalping-knife were being brandished around it.
“They’re coming from the direction where Apaches would come,” pursues Vicente. “Besides, they have no baggage; not a woman or child to be seen with them. All men, mounted and armed.”
“Indeed, if it be so,” rejoins Don Estevan, with brow now darkly shadowed, “we can expect no friendship from them.”
“No mercy either!” adds the gold-seeker. “Nor have we a right to expect it, after the treatment they’ve had at the hands of Captain Gil Perez and his men.”
All know to what Vicente alludes: a massacre of Apache Indians by a party of Mexican soldiers, after being lured and lulled into false security by professions of peace—cold-blooded and cruel, as any recorded in the annals of frontier warfare.