Jimmie himself was pretty well used to Apaches. They prowled about Camp Grant, and attacked people on the road from Tucson, and frequently the soldiers rode out after them. Joe Felmer had married an Apache woman, who was now dead; he spoke Apache and Jimmie had picked up a number of the words; but there were plenty of unfriendly Apaches who every little while ran off with Joe’s mules or filled his hogs with arrows. On his back under the mesquite tree Jimmie was not thinking of Apaches. He was idly surveying the country――at the same time having an ear open to the musical tinkle of the bell-wether, who told him where the sheep were straying. And a delightful, dreamy outlook this was, over all those quiet miles of mountain and desert Arizona which only the Southern stage-line traversed, and which, so thinly settled by white people, the roving Apache Indians claimed as their own. In his loose cotton shirt and ragged cotton trousers Jimmie felt very comfortable. Presently his eyes closed, his head drooped, and he nodded off, for forty or so winks. He dozed, he was certain, not more than five minutes; or perhaps ten. Then he awakened with a sudden start. Something had told him to awaken. He sat up and looked to see that the sheep were all right. He could not see one animal, but he heard the tinkle, tinkle. He twisted about to find the old bell-wether――and he gazed full into the grinning face of an Apache boy! The Apache boy, who appeared to be fourteen or fifteen years old, was not more than five yards from him――standing there beside a giant cactus, naked except for a red cloth band about his forehead, and a whitish cotton girdle about his middle, with the broad ends hanging down before and behind, and regular Apache moccasins reaching like leggins half way up his thighs for protection against the brush: standing there, grinning, in his left hand a bow, in his right the wether’s bell! _He had been tinkling that bell!_ And a smart trick this was, too: to sneak up on the wether, get the bell, and ring it to fool the herder while other Apaches drove away the sheep! For an instant Jimmie stared perfectly paralyzed with astonishment. He could not believe his eyes. Instead of a staid old tame sheep, here was a mischievous young wild Apache! Then, trying to utter a shout, up he sprang, to run. On the moment he heard a sharp swish, the noose of an Apache’s rawhide rope whipped about his shoulders, and right in mid-step he was jerked backward so violently, head over heels, that he had no time or breath for yelling a word. Barely had he landed topsy turvy in the brush when a heavy body rushed for him, a supple dark hand was clapped firmly over his mouth, and hauled upright he was half dragged, half carried, through the mesquites and the cactuses and around the slope of the hill.