Chapter 5

For by that time he had become, in her eyes, the exemplar of all that is inspiringly bold and daring, and he felt it necessary to keep up his reputation. For her he was a knight of prowess who could do anything he wished and against whom nothing could prevail. So he told her wonderful tales of what he had seen and done and been through, and of his daily adventures, and brought to her the occasional results of his single-handed combats with birds and beasts. He offered to dig up a tarantula's nest for her and to catch and tame for her pleasure a side-winder rattlesnake, or, if she preferred, a golden oriole or a mocking-bird. It did n't make any difference to him whether she chose a rattlesnake or an oriole; whatever she wanted him to do, he was ready to attempt. And Madge looked and listened and worshipped; and Kid, basking in the warmth of her adoration, swaggered about in ever increasing pride and importance.

One day, just after he had returned from a two days' trip out on the range, I heard him telling her a blood-curdling tale of an adventure with a mysterious and villainous looking Mexican, who, he said, had shot off the end of one of his fingers. Then, the Kid declared, he had made Dynamite rear and strike the Mexican to the ground with his forefeet and then trample him until he was so dead that he 'd never shoot anybody else's finger off.

Madge was filled with horror and admiration and pity, and begged to be allowed to see and bind up the mutilated finger. But he refused with superior indifference, clinched his bleeding finger in his fist and said it was n't anything and did n't hurt, anyway. Madge's mother called her away, and straightway there appeared at my door a boy with pale face, quivering lips, and tear-filled eyes, holding up a bloody hand. I bound up the wound, which was a clean cut chipping off the end of one finger, and he buried his face in my lap and cried. Soothing and cuddling him, for somehow I felt that was what the child needed, I asked:

"How did you hurt yourself, Kid?"

"I was making a peg to hang my saddle on, and I chopped my finger with the hatchet."

I said nothing, but soothed and cuddled him the more, and he sobbed at my knee in sheer enjoyment of the luxury of being babied. After that I think he took occasion to hurt himself upon every possible opportunity in order that he might come to my room to be taken care of and petted and comforted. He left all his swagger and bluster and bravado outside, and I babied him to his heart's content, feeling sure that it was the first time in all his dozen years that this child's right had come to him. But he did not allow these private seasons of relaxation, which he trusted me not to betray, to interfere with his double character of knight of prowess with Madge, and of Broncho Bob with the men.

Excitement did not lack at the ranch-house whenever Kid was at home. If he was sent to help with the milking, one of the cows was sure to kick over a full milk-pail, knock him over with her hoof, or break loose from her restraining ropes, charge around the corral like a wild beast, and crash through one of the house windows or plunge in at an open door. If he was told to house the geese and chickens for the night, such a commotion ensued as brought the whole household to see if coyotes had broken into the chicken yard. At sight of him the pet Angora goats fled on their swiftest legs, with a running leap mounted one of the corral sheds, and then sped to what they had learned was the only place of safety, the roof of the house. And when he was not stirring up the animals, he was playing jokes on the cowboys. Holy John, a middle-aged, thick-witted fellow, who never knew what had happened to him until the rest were roaring with laughter, was the special butt of his tricks.

One evening the boys were sitting around the kitchen door talking quietly, for Kid was off with Madge, helping her to bury a dead kitten. Holy John sat in a slouching attitude on the doorsteps, his new sombrero, with a stiff, curled brim, tipped far back on his head. Kid came in through the corral and stood in the kitchen for a few minutes. Then he seized the molasses jug and, tiptoeing very softly behind Holy John, filled the brim of his brand-new sombrero with the sticky liquid. It flowed out over his back and down into his trousers, and Holy John lifted a wondering and bewildered face to see his companions breaking into uproarious mirth. Then his long-enduring patience was smothered in wrath, and he laid violent hands upon Kid and spanked him before Madge's eyes.

This was too much for a knight of prowess tamely to endure, and the boy blustered around in his most vigorous impersonation of the character of Broncho Bob.

"This ranch ain't big enough to hold Holy John and me too. Him or me, one or the other, has sure got to ask for his time, and it won't be me either, you hear me shout. I 'll get him sure buffaloed, and if he don't pull his freight before he 's a day older, there 'll be the biggest killing here that Apache Teju ever heard of."

It was very quiet the next day at the ranch. Mr. and Mrs. Williams and Madge had driven to Silver City, the cowboys were all on the range, and I kept in my room with some work. After a time I heard a noise at the end of the house, just outside my room, and I went to see what it was. Kid was there with a pick and shovel, toilsomely digging a hole in the hard adobe soil.

"What are you doing, Kid?"

"Nothing much. Just digging a hole."

"Isn't that where the old Apache chief is buried?"

He looked up with interest. "Is this the place? Do you know right where it is?"

"They told me it is there where you are digging. Those rocks that you can barely see, outline his grave. Are you going to dig him up?"

"Me? What would I want to dig him up for? I ain't lost no Injun! I 'm just digging a hole--for Madge. She wants to plant a tree. What did they bury him here for? Did they kill him here on the ranch?"

"This was a fort once, before there was any ranch here, and there was a war with the Apaches, and they were getting beaten, and so they sent this old chief down to the fort to make terms for them. The commander received him and put him in a tent and set a guard over him. In the night the guard fell asleep, and when he wakened he was frightened lest the Indian might have escaped. So he punched into the tent with his bayonet to see if he was still there, and hit the chief in the foot. That made him angry and he came out and killed the guard. The noise roused the soldiers, and they killed the chief, and they buried him here, inside the stockade, so that the Indians would n't suspect that he was dead until they could get reinforcements."

"The Injun killed the guard, did he? Good enough for him! I wish it had been Holy John!"

He fell to work again with more vigor than ever, but presently he stopped and growled:

"I 'd like to run a blaze on that ornery galoot that he 'd remember all the rest of his life!"

After a while I chanced to see Kid carrying a bundle done up in a gunny sack down to the _acequia_ and hide it among the currant bushes. I noticed that he had carefully filled up the hole he had been digging, and I asked,

"Aren't you going to plant the tree?"

"No," he replied carelessly, "it would n't grow there. The soil's too hard."

The cowboys spread their beds every night under the cottonwoods beside the lower acequia, and that night we heard them in earnest discussion long after they had gone to bed. Mr. Williams was with them for a short time and came back, saying that they were talking about ghosts, and that Kid had declared emphatically that the old Apache chief walked o' nights and that he had both seen and heard him.

"He gave a vivid description," Mr. Williams went on, "of waking up one night and seeing the Indian's skeleton rise up out of the ground and pounce on a soldier who stood near and kill him outright. He will have Holy John so terrified that the poor fellow will want his time at once. For John believes everything that is impossible, and he will see ghosts all night long and be afraid of his own shadow in the daytime."

That night, just as morning broke, the whole household was awakened by a loud, piercing yell, followed by another and another, and all rushed from their beds in time to see Holy John leap over the fence and dart down the road, still shrieking as if fiends were after him. And beside his deserted bed under the cottonwoods lay some grisly thing, shining in the gray light with streaks and patches of white. Kid looked after the flying figure and said, in a tone of extremest satisfaction,

"He's sure buffaloed!"

Holy John had awakened in the dim, early dawn and found the skeleton of the Apache chief cuddling against him.

That morning, as I sat in the yard reading, the voices of Kid and Madge came to me from around the corner of the house, and I heard a snatch of their conversation.

"Madge, I 'm going to pull my freight. I won't work on the same ranch with such a coward as that Holy John."

"Truly, Guy, are you going away?"

"Yes, I am. I ain't going to stop to ask for my time. I 'm going to-day, before the boss comes home."

"Well, then, what am I going to do? You 're not going off to leave me?"

Silence for the space of ten seconds.

"Jiminy! Tell you what, you come too!"

"I can't! Mamma wouldn't let me!"

"Don't ask her. Come right along with me! We 'll elope! That's more fun than anything! Girls that is anything always elopes!"

Then they wandered off to the alfalfa field, and soon I saw them throwing stones at the prairie dogs with which it was infested. So I concluded that what I had heard was merely some of the Kid's braggadocio, and, smiling at the sentimental turn he had taken, I went on with my book and thought no more of it.

But when lunch time came neither Madge nor Kid appeared for the meal. Much calling failed to bring a response. Then I remembered and gave account of the conversation I had heard. It was found that Dynamite was gone from the corral. Evidently the little scapegrace had meant what he said and had carried Madge off. Mrs. Williams ordered the cart and at once we started after the fugitives.

"He has most probably gone toward Deming," she said. "I will send Red Jack to Whitewater to stop them if they are there, but I think we had better drive toward Deming as fast as possible."

About ten miles out we caught sight of the runaways. They were mounted on Dynamite, Madge holding fast behind. Kid was urging the horse furiously back and forth among a flock of carrion crows, and practising with his lasso upon them as they rose and flapped about in short and heavy flight. They seemed to be having great sport, for Kid was shouting and yelling at the birds, and Madge screaming with laughter at their clumsy efforts to escape. So absorbed were they in their play that they did not see us until we were almost beside them. At first Kid made as if he would start Dynamite off on the gallop, but Mrs. Williams called to him sternly, and he turned and trotted back to us, smiling and looking amazingly innocent.

Madge sat still and stared at us with big, frightened eyes, until Mrs. Williams had twice spoken to her, and then she slipped quickly down, to be folded in her mother's arms and sob upon her bosom all the way home. I persuaded the Kid to sit between us in the cart and drive us back, tying Dynamite behind.

"He was awful mad at first," the boy confidingly said, "to have to carry double. But I made him sure hump himself right along."

At home we found the superintendent just returned. He gave the Kid a paternal lecture, which probably did him as much good as if it had been in Chinese, and then, in cattle-ranch parlance, gave him his time--paid him to date and discharged him.

And a few minutes later we saw the last of the Kid, as the forlorn little figure, with the wide, flopping sombrero, and the big, dragging spur, walked out of the gate and down the road toward Whitewater, and was soon swallowed in the shimmering heat of the plain.

A BLAZE ON PARD HUFF

"And I 'm free to say that the grand results of my explorations show That somehow paint gets redder the farther out West I go!" --EUGENE FIELD.

One summer night I was on a train that was speeding eastward across southern New Mexico. It was one of the white nights of that region, when the full moon, shining like sun-lighted snow and hanging so low in the sky that it seems to be dropping earthward, fills the clear, dry air with a silvery radiance and floods the barren plain with a transfiguring whiteness, in which the gray sands glimmer as if with some unearthly light of their own.

The day had been long, wearisome, and unspeakably hot and dusty; and with the coming of this beautiful night and its cool breezes most of the passengers betook themselves to the car steps and platforms, where they lingered until we reached the little town of Separ, late in the evening. As the train stopped, we saw that apparently the entire population of the village was crowded inside the station house. One after another, men came cautiously out upon the platform, carrying guns in their hands and casting long, anxious looks across the plain. Their set faces and ready revolvers and rifles showed that it was no ordinary matter which had sent the whole town to find protection in the railroad depot.

They told us that a man had come running into town a little while before, and, falling headlong, exhausted, at the feet of the first person he met, had cried out that the Apaches were coming. Hastily revived and cared for, he explained that the Indians had attacked the cattle camp, ten or twelve miles south of Separ, where he and some other cowboys had been making a round-up, and killed all but himself. He had managed to creep out undiscovered and had run at the top of his speed all the way to Separ to bring the warning. He said that the Apaches, in a large band, numbering at least a hundred, had surprised the camp, killing the men as they lay in their blankets and committing horrible atrocities upon the dead bodies, and had then fallen upon the horses and cattle, killing and maiming the poor beasts in mere lust of cruelty. He was sure they were following him--he had heard their yells several times during his desperate race, and each time he had redoubled his speed. His shoes were gone, his stockings hung in shreds from his ankles, and his feet were a mass of raw and bleeding flesh, pierced by hundreds of cactus thorns. He had hurried away on an Eastern-bound freight train to Deming, the next station, to rouse the citizens and help to raise a militia company, whose coming was expected in a few hours. And telegrams had been sent to Fort Bayard giving news of the outbreak and asking for a troop of cavalry.

Every soul in Separ--men, women, and children--with all the arms and ammunition in the town, had huddled into the station house, where they hoped they would be able to make a successful resistance, and, as one man said, "make as many good Injuns as the Lord would let them." For in those days the hearts of the bravest in the Southwest knew terror, and with good reason, when the Apache went on the war path.

The train sped on into the radiant white night, but the car steps and platforms were deserted. The passengers all sought their berths as soon as possible, there to lie below the level of the windows and pile all the pillows they could get between themselves and the side of the car. When we reached Deming we found the place in an uproar. Every bell in town, from the gong of the railroad restaurant to the church bell, was ringing its loudest and wildest. Men in varied degrees of undress were running up and down the streets calling loudly upon all citizens to come out at once. The people were assembling at the depot, where two or three of the cooler-headed had taken the place of leaders and had begun to organize the excited mass into an armed and officered company and get it ready to go quickly to the assistance of beleaguered little Separ.

Then our train sped on again through the wondrous night, and I knew no more about the Indian war at Separ until I sat on the kitchen doorstep at Apache Teju, one evening some years later, and beguiled Texas Bill into telling me yarns of his long and checkered experience as a cowboy.

The cool, soft breath of evening filled the air, the alfalfa field glowed its most vivid emerald in the yellow rays of the setting sun, and in the same rich light the gray, barren hillside beyond shone like beaten gold. And Texas Bill, just in from a week's trip on the range, soothed and inspired by the civilizing influences of the ranch-house, a shave, clean clothes, and his supper, unbent from his usual bashful dignity and talked.

Texas Bill was tall and big and loose-jointed, and he spoke always in a long, soft, indifferent drawl. He held two articles of belief which no man might dispute without getting sight of the knife in his bootleg or the revolver on his hip. One was that Texas was the biggest and best State in the Union; and the other, that the cow business was no longer fit for a gentleman to follow. He lounged on a bench beside the door and told me tales of the range and the round-up, of herds of cattle stampeded by the smell of water, of long rides in blinding sand storms, of the taking in of the tenderfoot, of centipedes and side-winders, of Indian fights and narrow escapes.

"Were you ever in one of these Indian attacks yourself?" I asked, for his Indian yarns had been about other men.

Texas Bill solemnly considered the heel of his boot a moment, and then just as solemnly replied:

"Yes, I was killed by the Apaches oncet."

He turned a serious face off toward Cooke's Peak, which towered, a mighty, sculptured mass of purest sapphire blue, against a turquoise sky; and I, seeing that his countenance bore just such an expression of inscrutable solemnity as it might have done had he been acting as chief mourner at his own funeral, answered just as soberly:

"That must have been very interesting! I wish you would tell me about it."

His gaze returned to his feet, his face relaxed into a smile, a chuckle began somewhere in his throat, wandered down his long frame and lost itself in his boots, which were high-heeled and two sizes too small for him. Then he spoke again:

"That was the time we run a blaze on Pard Huff."

Then he relapsed into silence, contemplation of his boots, and several successive and long-drawn chuckles. But at last he began his story.

"You see, Pard Huff, he was a tenderfoot, and there was n't nothin' he was n't afraid of a-tall. You could n't convince him that coyotes ain't dangerous; and he thought it was sure death if a tarantula looked at him; and you could make him jump out of his boots any time by just buzzin' your tongue behind his ear. I reckon he 'd have sure died of fright if he had ever seen a live rattlesnake spittin' its tongue at him.

"And Injuns! Well, he watched for Apaches all day long a durn sight more 'n he did for cattle, and he could n't sleep nights for bein' afraid they 'd catch him. He did n't seem to think of anything but Apaches, and he had n't been with us very long till the boys did n't give him a chanst to think of anything else a-tall.

"We was makin' a round-up down below Separ then, and there was ten of us and the chuck wagon when we made camp at night. Well, one night, Pard Huff, he was scareder than ever, and the boys struck his gait right off and kep' him a-runnin'. I did n't know they was goin' to blaze him quite so bad or I 'd have done my best to stop the thing. Well, and they would n't, either, if he had n't been the meanest sort of a coward that ever laid awake nights. He asked each of us separate, and then all of us in a bunch at supper, if there was any danger of Apaches down there, and we-all told him there was, lots of it. One of the boys said he 'd seen signs over toward Hatchet Mountain that very day that sure meant Apaches, and another said he 'd heard that a little ranch about forty mile away had lately been cleaned out by them and everybody killed. Then we-all talked about it and agreed that they might come on us any minute, that most likely they 'd attack us that very night and that we ought to be ready for them.

"Well, sir, that Pard Huff, he never said another word. He just set there with his eyes getting bigger and his face whiter every minute. We kep' it up and told stories about the way them devils do--everything we 'd ever heard of--how they hold you and pull out your tongue, or cut off your ears, or run a stake through you and pin you to the ground, or smash your face to a jelly with a rock, or burn you alive, till Pard Huff did n't know which end he was a-standin' on a-tall.

"We got out our blankets and turned in, but just kep' a-talkin' about the Apaches till that Pard Huff, he was shakin' as if he had a fit. One of the boys said he 'd bet if the Apaches did come, Pard Huff would get his ears cut off the first rattle, because they was so big the Injuns could n't see nothin' else a-tall in camp till they got them out of the way. And then _bang! bang! bang!_ went some six-shooters, the boys yelled 'Injuns!'--'Apaches!' as loud as they could, and the feller on the other side of Pard Huff (Pard was layin' next to me) yelled out. 'Boys, I 'm killed!' says he, and he rolled over on his face and kicked and yelled and groaned. Then _bang! bang! bang!_ went the six-shooters again; and then you ought to have seen that Pard Huff! Well, sir, he was sure buffaloed! He jumped out of his blankets and let out one yell. The chuck wagon was right behind us, and he give one jump and went clean over it and lit out across country like an antelope. You-all just ought to 've seen that tenderfoot pull his freight!

"The boys come up a-laughin' and watched him run. They was a-bettin' he would n't stop till he got to Apache Teju, but I said it was n't right to buffalo him that bad. So we-all yelled and called him to come back, but he only run the faster. The durn fool tenderfoot thought it was the Apaches chasin' him! We-all thought he 'd soon find out there was nothin' wrong a-tall and come back, and so we went to bed again. But he did n't.

"The next day I had to come to Apache Teju and I found Pard Huff's bloody tracks most all the way to Separ. He 'd run right over stones and cactus and prairie dog holes and everything else in his way. And them fool people at Separ was all huddled up in the depot, and a company of men with Winchesters and six-shooters was there from Deming, and everybody was watchin' the country all 'round with spyglasses, for Injuns! Well, sir, that durn fool tenderfoot, that Pard Huff, had told them a fool yarn about the Apaches surprisin' our camp and killin' everybody but him, and they was sure buffaloed!"

"Yes," I said, "I know they were."

"You! How did you know anything about it?"

"Oh, I was there that night. I passed through on the train, and Separ and Deming were the worst scared towns I ever saw."

Texas Bill chuckled, pleased at this verification of his story, and went on:

"Then you know what I 'm tellin' you is sure true! I thought mebbe you-all mightn't believe it, a-tall, for it sure don't look reasonable that folks could get so buffaloed over a durn fool tenderfoot's yarn. They looked at me with mighty big eyes when I rode into Separ.

"'Why,' says they, 'how did you-all get out alive? We sure thought you was dead!'

"'Well,' says I, 'as far as I know, I 'm sure alive; and I don't know as I 've been into anything to get out of a-tall.'

"'Why,' says they, 'Pard Huff--'