“Good!” exclaimed the bluff old colonel, heartily, as their hands clasped.
One by one, family by family, the Apaches bade farewell to their homes and then descended the cave tunnel. A procession followed made up of Sid and Scotty, Colonel Colvin and Niltci, carrying Big John on an improvised stretcher. Two horses with the Colonel and Sid riding them, bore a pole litter for Big John thereafter; the rest were laden with every jar of water the Apaches possessed. And so the cavalcade set forth north into the desert.
Sid turned to look back for the last time at Red Mesa. High and lifted up, its walls rose in huge flanks out of the mountain side, glaring in the burning sun. Soon there would be no life there, no luxuriant roothold for green living plants, no happy home for a simple people. When Scotty got his company organized—and he did, in due time, but that is beyond the province of this story—there would be a scene of sweating activity there, ore cars coming and going, men and burros toiling, the great tank repaired and giving water to them all.
But Sid did not want to think of that. Rather he would like always to remember it as the one place he knew where once Indians had lived as their forefathers had, long before the white man came—in simple, reverent faith in the Great Mystery, in the simple needs of a free people, in the simple, sure, old foundations of Indian morality—Courage, Honor, Truth, Chastity.
Three days later they reached Ajo Mines. The company lent the Colonel a train of empty ore cars and the railroad took them to the main line. Thence the Colonel led Honanta and his people to a land of mighty mountain ranges, of green alfalfa fields strung along a rushing river dominated by beetling crags, of herds of fat cattle grazing in a land of plenty. And here, under the protection of the name Colvin, in the timbered hills of their forefathers, Honanta and the Yellow Bear clan of the Apache at last found peace.
THE END
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