riders carried a lance, long
tassels of woolly hair streaming from below its head. Travis saw in them
a formidable array of barbaric fighting men, but he thought that man for
man the Apaches could not only take on the Mongols with confidence, but
might well defeat them.

The Apache had never been a hot-headed, ride-for-glory fighter like the
Cheyenne, the Sioux, and the Comanche of the open plains. He estimated
the odds against him, used ambush, trick, and every feature of the
countryside as weapon and defense. Fifteen Apache fighting men under
Chief Geronimo had kept five thousand American and Mexican troops in the
field for a year and had come off victorious for the moment.

Travis knew the tales of Genghis Khan and his formidable generals who
swept over Asia into Europe, unbeaten and seemingly undefeatable. But
they had been a wild wave, fed by a reservoir of manpower from the
steppes of their homeland, utilizing driven walls of captives to protect
their own men in city assaults and attacks. He doubted if even that
endless sea of men could have won the Arizona desert defended by Apaches
under Cochise, Victorio, or Magnus Colorado. The white man had done
it--by superior arms and attrition; but bow against bow, knife against
sword, craft and cunning against craft and cunning--he did not think
so....

Hulagur dropped the end of the lariat, and Kaydessa swung around,
loosening the loop so that the rope fell to Travis' feet. The Apache
stepped free of it, turned and passed between two of the horsemen to
gather up the bow he had dropped. The coyotes had gone with him and when
he turned again to face the company of Tatars, both animals crowded past
him to the entrance of the valley, plainly urging him to retire there.

The horsemen had faced about also, and the warrior with the lance
balanced the shaft of the weapon in his hand as if considering the
possibility of trying to spear Travis. But just then Kaydessa came up,
towing Hulagur by a firm hold on his sash-belt.

"I have told this one," she reported to Travis, "how it is between us
and that you also are enemy to those who hunt us. It is well that you
sit together beside a fire and talk of these things."

Again that boom-boom broke her speech, coming from farther out in the
open land.

"You will do this?" She made of it a half question, half statement.

Travis glanced about him. He could dodge back into the misty valley of
the towers before the Tatars could rid