sked, would have said at once, "Send for General Crook," but that
would be confession that he, the experienced, did not know how to
handle the situation. So again he took no counsel with Wickham, but
issued instructions in the name of the department commander and ordered
them carried out forthwith.

Then it transpired that only two couriers were fit to go. Thereupon,
the commanding officer of the one cavalry troop at the post was ordered
to detail three non-commissioned officers, with a brace of troopers
apiece, as bearers of despatches to Date Creek, Wickenberg, Sandy and
the reservation, while Sanchez, the Mexican-Apache Mercury, was ordered
to hasten back to Almy by way of the Mazatzal. It was then but ten
A.M., and to the annoyance of the adjutant-general, Sanchez shook his
black mane and said something that sounded like _hasta la noche_--he
wouldn't start till night. Asked why, the interpreter said he feared
Apache Tontos, and being assured by the adjutant-general that no Tonto
could be west of the Verde, intimated his conviction of the officer's
misinformation by the only sign he knew as bearing on the matter--that
of the forked tongue, which called for no interpreter, as it concisely
said, You lie. Sanchez meant neither insult nor insolence, but the
adjutant-general regarded it as both, ordered another sergeant and two
men got ready at once to ride to Almy, and bade the interpreter take
Sanchez to the post guard-house and turn him over for discipline to the
officer of the day. The sergeant started forty minutes later, with his
two men at his back, and just thirty-five minutes behind Sanchez, who
left the station on the spur of the moment, and the interpreter with a
cleft weasand. It is a mistake for one man to attempt the incarceration
of an armed half-blood of the Indian race. Sanchez started in the lead,
afoot, and, in spite of his fear of Tontos, kept it all the way to the
Mazatzal, where, as was later learned, he abandoned the paths of
rectitude and the trail to Almy, and joining a party of twenty young
renegades, complacently watched the coming of that sergeant and
detachment from behind the sheltering bowlders of Dead Man's Canon, and
thus it happened that the orders Archer had been expecting three long
days and nights were destined never to get to him.

It was this situation he had been puzzling over when at ten P.M. the
officer of the day came in to say that new signal fires in the east
were now being an