re the bare summits of the Dragoon range broke into a multitude of
ragged pinnacles against the eastern horizon, another swarthy warrior
stood, remote as a roosting eagle on the heights. Beneath his
feet--the drop was so sheer that he could have kicked a pebble to the
bottom without its touching the face of the cliff in its fall--the
shadows of the mountain lay black on the mesquite flat. He gazed
across that wide plain and the mesas climbing heavenward beyond it in
a series of glowing steps. His face assumed a peculiar intentness as
he watched the distant smoke column; it was the intentness of a man
who is reading under difficulties. In dot and dash he spelled it as it
rose--the tidings of those two prospectors who traveled up the wash.

While the last puff was fading away he glided down from pinnacle to
narrow shelf, from shelf to cliff, and made his way toward the rocks
below to tell the news to the rest of his band.

Their camp lay at the head of a steep gorge. Several low wickiups had
been fashioned by binding the tops of bushes together and throwing
skins or tattered blankets over the arched stems. Offal and carrion
were strewn all about the place; it swarmed with flies. Nesting
vultures would have built more carefully and been fully as fastidious.
When the warrior reached the spot the rocks became alive with naked
forms; they appeared from all sides as suddenly and silently as
quail.

He told the tidings to the men. An unclean, vermin-ridden group, they
squatted around him while he repeated the smoke message, word for
word. There was no particular show of enthusiasm among them, no
sign of haste. They began to prepare for this business as other
men begin getting ready for a day's work, when they see good wages
ahead of them and the task is very much to their taste. Prospectors
were becoming an old story in that summer of 1877; two of them
meant good pickings--bacon, coffee, sugar, and firearms; and there was
the fun of killing with the chance for torture thrown in.

Some of the band departed leisurely to catch the ponies. The victims
would be busy for a long time in the wash. They would not travel far
to make their camp. And wherever they went they must leave tracks. The
day was far advanced when the party rode forth upon the flat, their
dirty turbans bobbing up and down above the mesquite bushes as they
came along.

Several of them carried lances; there was a sprinkling of bows and
arrows; a number bore rif