One by one, family by family, the Apaches bade farewell to their homes
and then descended the cave tunnel. A procession followed made up of
Sid and Scotty, Colonel Colvin and Niltci, carrying Big John on an
improvised stretcher. Two horses with the Colonel and Sid riding them,
bore a pole litter for Big John thereafter; the rest were laden with
every jar of water the Apaches possessed. And so the cavalcade set
forth north into the desert.
Sid turned to look back for the last time at Red Mesa. High and lifted
up, its walls rose in huge flanks out of the mountain side, glaring
in the burning sun. Soon there would be no life there, no luxuriant
roothold for green living plants, no happy home for a simple people.
When Scotty got his company organized--and he _did_, in due time, but
that is beyond the province of this story--there would be a scene of
sweating activity there, ore cars coming and going, men and burros
toiling, the great tank repaired and giving water to them all.
But Sid did not want to think of that. Rather he would like always
to remember it as the one place he knew where once Indians had
lived as their forefathers had, long before the white man came--in
simple, reverent faith in the Great Mystery, in the simple needs
of a free people, in the simple, sure, old foundations of Indian
morality--Courage, Honor, Truth, Chastity.
Three days later they reached Ajo Mines. The company lent the Colonel
a train of empty ore cars and the railroad took them to the main line.
Thence the Colonel led Honanta and his people to a land of mighty
mountain ranges, of green alfalfa fields strung along a rushing river
dominated by beetling crags, of herds of fat cattle grazing in a land
of plenty. And here, under the protection of the name Colvin, in the
timbered hills of their forefathers, Honanta and the Yellow Bear clan
of the Apache at last found peace.
THE END
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