Inside the cave was a scene that made the roughest soldier among them shudder. Men, women, and children, either dead or in the agonies of death, were lying in piles three and four deep. At first it appeared as if danger was to be expected from some wounded Indian, and while part of the soldiers worked among the debris on the floor, others watched with guns in hand for signs of hostile intent. But nothing of the kind occurred.
Only one man was alive and he died soon after the soldiers entered the cave. Some seventy-eight dead bodies were lying in the cave, and of the living there were but eighteen, all squaws. Many of the wounded squaws could have been saved had the troops been accompanied by a surgeon or even provided with the necessary medical supplies.
The few that had lived through that awful hail of lead and rocks, were saved by screening themselves from the missiles under great slabs of slate which the squaws had packed into the caves for cooking purposes, or by hiding under or behind the dead bodies of their comrades.
The fight was over; the dead babies lay in their dead mothers' arms. Rough men as they were, the sights made the soldiers sick at heart; such warfare was not to their liking.
As it was impossible to bury the dead, they were left in the cave where they fell and where they lie today, in great heaps of skulls and bones, together with clothing and other camp impedimenta which have survived the years in the dry atmosphere of the region.
After satisfying themselves that no more living were among the bodies the soldiers tramped wearily back to Fort McDowell with their prisoners and wounded, and the brief official report of the affair closed the incident.
It was more than a thousand miles over desert and mountain to the nearest railroad station and civilization. No war correspondent trailed along in their wake, armed with kodak and typewriter, to tell a waiting world of their prowess; no flaming headlines in the morrow's paper would cry out their victory. They were "just regulars," and this was but the day's work.
