When the West was youngBechdolt, Frederick R. (Frederick Ritchie)
History
When the West was young
Bechdolt, Frederick R. (Frederick Ritchie)
West (U.S.) -- History
Felix had managed to find a wife, a half-breed Mexican woman; and she
had borne him children, two or three of them. He had a ranch some
distance from the town, and many cattle.
And on the great day of his life, the day when he became glorious, he
was driving from the ranch to Prescott with his family: a two-horse
buckboard and Felix at the reins; the woman and the children bestowed
beside him and about him.
Somewhere along the road the Apaches "jumped" them, to use the idiom
of those times. A mounted band and on their way across-country, they
spied the buckboard and started after it. The road was rough; the
half-broken ponies weary; and the renegades gained at every jump.
Felix plied the whip and kept his broncos to the dead run until their
legs were growing heavy under them and the run slackened to a
lumbering gallop.
Prescott was only a few miles away. They reached a place where the
road ran between rocky banks, a place where there was no going save by
the wagon-track.
Felix slipped his arm around his wife and kissed her. It was perhaps
the first time he had done it in years; one can easily believe that.
He kissed the children.
"Whip 'em up," he bade the woman. "I'll hold the road for you."
And he jumped off of the buckboard with his rifle and sixteen rounds
of ammunition.
In Prescott the woman told the story and a relief party rode out
within a half-hour. They found the body of the short-card man and
stock-thief with the bodies of fourteen Indians sprinkled about among
the rocks. And the surviving Apaches, instead of mutilating the
remains of their dead enemy as was their custom on such occasions, had
placed a bandanna handkerchief over his face, weighting down its
corners with pebbles lest the wind blow it away.
It was near Prescott--only four miles below the village--that a woman
fought Apaches all through a long September afternoon. The Hon. Lewis
A. Stevens was in town attending a session of the Territorial
Legislature and his wife was in charge of the ranch near the Point of
Rocks that day in 1867. A hired man was working about the place.
One hundred yards away from the house an enormous pile of boulders
rose toward the nearer hills. Beneath some of the overhanging rocks
were great caves, and the depressions between the ridges gave
hiding-places to shelter scores of men.
Shortly after noon Mrs. Stevens happened to look from the window of
the kitchen where she was at work. Something was moving behind a clump
of spiked niggerheads between the back door and the corrals; at first
glance it looked like a dirty rag stirring in the wind, but when the
woman had held her eyes on it a moment she saw, among the bits of rock
and the thorny twigs with which it had been camouflaged, the folds of
an Apache warrior's head-gear.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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