An Apache Princess by Charles King (online e reader TXT) 📕

had led to his final overthrow. Daly, however, had come direct from the care of a tribe of the Pueblo persuasion, peace-loving and tillers of the soil, meek as the Pimas and Maricopas, natives who fawned when he frowned and cringed at the crack of his whip. These he had successfully, and not dishonestly, ruled, but that very experience had unfitted him for duty over the mountain Apache, who cringed no more than did the lordly Sioux or Cheyenne, and truckled to no man less than a tribal chief. Blakely, the soldier, cool, fearless, and resolute, but scrupulously just, they believed in and feared; but this new blusterer only made them laugh, until he scandalized them by wholesale arrest and punishment. Then their childlike merriment changed swiftly to furious and scowling hate,—to open defiance, and finally, when he dared lay hands on a chosen daughter of the race, to mutiny and the knife. Graham, serving his third year in the valley, had seen the crisis coming and sought to warn the man. But what should an army doctor know of an Apache Indian? said Daly, and, fatuous in his own conceit, the crisis found him unprepared.

"Go you for a stretcher," said the surgeon, after a quick look into the livid face. "Lay him down gently there," and kneeling, busied himself with opening a way to the wound. Out over the flats swung the long skirmish line, picturesque in the variety of its undress, Cutler striding vociferous in its wake, while a bugler ran himself out of breath, far to the eastward front, to puff feeble and abortive breath into unresponsive copper. And still the same flutter of distant, scattering shots came drifting back from the brakes and cañons in the rocky wilds beyond the stream. The guard still pursued and the Indians still led, but they who knew anything well knew it could not be long before the latter turned on the scattering chase, and Byrne strode about, fuming with anxiety. "Thank God!" he cried, as a prodigious clatter of hoofs, on hollow and resounding wood, told of cavalry coming across the acequia, and Sanders galloped round the sandy point in search of the foe—or orders. "Thank God! Here, Sanders—pardon me, major, there isn't an instant to lose—Rush your men right on to the front there! Spread well out, but don't fire a shot unless attacked in force! Get those—chasing idiots and bring them in! By God, sir, we'll have an Indian war on our hands as it is!" And Sanders nodded and dug spurs to his troop horse, and sang out: "Left front into line—gallop!" and the rest was lost in a cloud of dust and the blare of cavalry trumpet.

Then the colonel turned to Plume, standing now silent and sore troubled. "It was the quickest way," he said apologetically. "Ordinarily I should have given the order through you, of course. But those beggars are armed to a man. They left their guns in the crevices of yonder rocks, probably, when they came for the morning music. We must have no fight over this unless they force it. I wish to heaven we hadn't killed—these two," and ruefully he looked at the stark forms—the dead lover of Natzie, the gasping tribesman just beyond, dying, knife in hand. "The general has been trying to curb Daly for the last ten days," continued he, "and warned him he'd bring on trouble. The interpreter split with him on Monday last, and there's been mischief brewing ever since. If only we could have kept Blakely there—all this row would have been averted!"

If only, indeed! was Plume thinking, as eagerly, anxiously he scanned the eastward shore, rising jagged, rocky, and forbidding from the willows of the stream bed. If only, indeed! Not only all this row of which Byrne had seen so much, but all this other row, this row within a row, this intricacy of mishaps and misery that involved the social universe of Camp Sandy, of which as yet the colonel, presumably, knew so very little; of which, as post commander, Plume had yet to tell him! An orderly came running with a field glass and a scrap of paper. Plume glanced at the latter, a pencil scrawl of his wife's inseparable companion, and, for aught he knew, confidante. "Madame," he could make out, and "affreusement" something, but it was enough. The orderly supplemented: "Leece, sir, says the lady is very bad—"

"Go to her, Plume," with startling promptitude cried the colonel. "I'll look to everything here. It's all coming out right," for with a tantara—tantara-ra-ra Sanders's troop, spreading far and wide, were scrambling up the shaly slopes a thousand yards away. "Go to your wife and tell her the danger's over," and, with hardly another glance at the moaning agent, now being limply hoisted on a hospital stretcher, thankfully the major went. "The lady's very bad, is she?" growled Byrne, in fierce aside to Graham. "That French hag sometimes speaks truth, in spite of herself. How d'you find him?" This with a toss of the head toward the vanishing stretcher.

"Bad likewise. These Apache knives dig deep. There's Mullins now—"

"Think that was Apache?" glared Byrne, with sudden light in his eyes, for Wren had told his troubles—all.

"Apache knife—yes."

"What the devil do you mean, Graham?" and the veteran soldier, who knew and liked the surgeon, whirled again on him with eyes that looked not like at all.

The doctor turned, his somber gaze following the now distant figure of the post commander, struggling painfully up the yielding sand of the steep slope to the plateau. The stretcher bearers and attendants were striding away to hospital with the now unconscious burden. The few men, lingering close at hand, were grouped about the dead Apaches. The gathering watchers along the bank were beyond earshot. Staff officer and surgeon were practically alone and the latter answered:

"I mean, sir, that if that Apache knife had been driven in by an Apache warrior, Mullins would have been dead long hours ago—which he isn't."

Byrne turned a shade grayer.

"Could she have done that?" he asked, with one sideward jerk of his head toward the major's quarters.

"I'm not saying," quoth the Scot. "I'm asking was there anyone else?"

CHAPTER IX A CARPET KNIGHT, INDEED