The offender started to run through the Indian camp, and the chief of police fired at him, but missed his aim and killed a luckless old squaw, who happened in range. This wretched marksmanship was resented by the Chiricahuas, who refused to be comforted by the profuse apologies tendered for the accident. They silently made their preparations, waiting long enough to catch the chief of police, kill him, cut off his head, and play a game of foot-ball with it; and then, like a flock of quail, the whole band, men, women, and children--710 in all--started on the dead run for the Mexican boundary, one hundred and fifty miles to the south. Hotly pursued by the troops, they fought their way across Southern Arizona and New Mexico, their route marked by blood and devastation. The valleys of the Santa Cruz and San Pedro witnessed a repetition of the once familiar scenes of farmers tilling their fields with rifles and shot-guns strapped to the plow-handle. While engaged in fighting off the American forces, which pressed too closely upon their rear, the Apaches were attacked in front by the Mexican column under Colonel Garcia, who, in a savagely contested fight, achieved a “substantial victory,” killing eighty-five and capturing thirty, eleven of which total of one hundred and fifteen were men, and the rest women and children. The Chiricahuas claim that when the main body of their warriors reached the scene of the engagement the Mexicans evinced no anxiety to come out from the rifle-pits they hastily dug. To this fact no allusion can be found in the Mexican commander’s published dispatches. [Illustration: APACHE VILLAGE SCENE.] The Chiricahuas, now reduced to an aggregate of less than 600--150 of whom were warriors and big boys, withdrew to the recesses of the adjacent Sierra Madre--their objective point. Not long after this the Chiricahuas made overtures for an armistice with the Mexicans, who invited them to a little town near Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, for a conference. They were courteously received, plied with liquor until drunk, and then attacked tooth and nail, ten or twelve warriors being killed and some twenty-live or thirty women hurried off to captivity. This is a one-sided description of the affair, given by a Chiricahua who participated. The newspapers of that date contained telegraph accounts of a fierce battle and another “victory” from Mexican sources; so that no doubt there is some basis for the story.