ng
fight of it somewhere along this portion of the route.

Such were conditions during the summer of 1877 when the tale begins in
the dry wash which comes down from the Tombstone hills into the valley
of the San Pedro, near where the hamlet of Fairbank stands to-day.

Fragments of horn silver lay scattered among the cactus and
dagger-plants in the bed of the dry wash. There was a point where the
stony slope above the bank was strewn with them. A little farther up,
an outcropping of high-grade ore showed plainly in the hard white
sunshine. The flank of the hill was leaking precious metal like a
rotting treasure-chest.

A solitary Apache stood on a mesa ten miles away. He had cut a fresh
trail down in the valley at dawn, and had dogged it reading every
minute sign--a displaced rock, a broken twig, a smudge of disturbed
earth--until he had the fulness of its meaning: two prospectors
leading a pack-mule, both men armed and keeping sharp lookout against
attack. Then he had climbed to this remote vantage-point and caught
sight of them as they turned from the river-bottom up the wash. They
were traveling straight toward that outcropping.

The Apache stood at the edge of the mesa facing the newly risen sun, a
savage vision in a savage land. His narrow turban, shred of
loin-cloth, and knee-high moccasins merely accentuated his nakedness;
they held no more suggestion of clothing than his mass of rusty black
hair and the ugly smears of paint across his cheeks. A tiny fire
beside him sent a tenuous smoke column into the glaring sky.

He kept his malignant little eyes on a notch in the Dragoon Mountains
twenty miles away, scowling against the sun's bright flood. Across the
far-flung interval of glowing mesas and dark mesquite flats the stark
granite ramparts frowned back at him. And now a hair-line of pallid
smoke twined upward from the point he watched.

He sank down, crouching beside his fire. He swept his hand over it
sprinkling bits of powdered resin into the wisp of flame. The smoke
turned black.

He waited for some moments, scanning the rising fumes, then swerved
his lean brown torso toward a mesquite bush. He stripped the leaves
from a twig and scattered them upon the blaze. A white puff climbed
into the sky.

From time to time he moved, now dropping on his belly to blow the
coals, now feeding them with resin, now with leaves. The slender
column crawled on upward taking alternate complexion, white and
black.

Whe