The Red Mustang

Here he came, not astride of the doleful pony that had carried him away, but riding an elegantly caparisoned steed. Some other horses followed him. He had gone out almost weaponless, and he was now overloaded with weapons. He had gone bareheaded, and now he wore a gorgeously gold-laced and yellow-plumed cocked hat, recently the special pride of a major of Mexican militia. Even the Reservation chimney-pot silk beauty, green veil and all, was altogether nothing compared with this.

Kah-go-mish had not exactly played Cortes, and conquered Mexico, but what he had done was very nearly the same to Wah-wah-o-be, Tah-nu-nu, and The-boy-whose-ear-pushed-away-a-piece-of-lead.

It was a great time, but the chief had the plans of a general in his head. No Mexican force would follow him into the Sierra, but one might try to head him off on the other side, and take away his horses, and it was time to be moving.

The band broke camp at once, to push on through the rugged mountain-paths as long as there might be daylight enough to go by. That was why the darkness, when it came, found them scattered all along the bottom of a tremendous gorge, walled in by vast perpendicular faces of quartz and granite rock. Even Ping thought it wonderful, when the straggling camp-fires were kindled, that their light did not stream half-way up those walls, and left the rest in shadow until the moon rose high enough to show them.

Chapter XIV.

THE FOUNTAIN IN THE DESERT

On the morning of the second day after Ping and Tah-nu-nu and the blankets proved to be too much "bad medicine" for one poor cougar, the sun arose hotly over one of the dreariest bits of scenery in southern New Mexico. It was the gravel desert described to Cal Evans by Sam Herrick. No mountains were visible on the south or east, and the ranges of tall peaks westerly and northerly were a very long day's journey from the most interesting spot in that entire plain. Everywhere else even the cactus-plants and scrubby mesquit-trees and stiff-fingered sage-brushes were scarce, as if they did not care to struggle for a living in so mean a country. Here, on the contrary, there was a dense chaparral of every kind of growth, excepting tall trees, that is common to that climate, and spreading for miles and miles. In many places the chaparral was so high and so thick that a man on horseback could have been hidden in it from another man at a short distance.

If any man had ridden into it, however, perhaps his first declaration might have been, "All this thorn and famine shrubbery was laid out by a lot of crazy spiders."

Innumerable paths led through it, crossing or running into each other in a manner to have perplexed a carpet-weaver or a military map-maker, and everybody knows what tangled patterns they can make. The spiders had not done it, but the larger kinds of four-footed wild animals. They had worked at those paths for ages, treading them down all the while, and preventing any vegetable growth from choking them up.

There was really no tangle, at least none that could perplex the clear mind of a bison or an antelope, and all the threads of that spider-web had more or less reference to a common centre towards which the main lines tended.

The dry and thirsty bushes on the outer circumference of the chaparral should not have settled where they did. They ought rather to have learned a lesson from the bisons, and have gone in farther. The wide main pathways ran into each other, and all the smaller pathways melted into them, until only twenty or thirty ends of paths led into a great open space, in the middle of which was the one thing needed by all that vast plain, with its dreary gravel and sand and alkali.

Water?

Yes, water as clear as crystal, and that seemed to be colder than ice.

The thirsty animals who were from year to year to traverse that plain had been provided for as if they had been so many sparrows, and the cactus-plants as if they had been lilies of the field.

The greater part of the open space was occupied by a seamed and broken face of quartz rock, nowhere rising more than a few feet above the general level. Scores and scores of miles away, among the unknown recesses of the Sierra, westward, was a lake, a reservoir, into which the everlasting snows continually melted. At some point of that reservoir a channel had been opened through and under the cloven strata of the rock, making a natural aqueduct. Cold and clear ran the snow-water, never failing in its wonderful supply, until it burst up into the burning sunshine in the very middle of the desert, of the chaparral, and of the spider-web of paths. It danced and gurgled, this morning, right under the timid noses of a gang of antelopes who had trotted in there by the shortest lane, not missing their way for a yard.

A motherly old sage-hen watched them from under a bush upon one side of the open, while in the opposite scrubs a large jackass rabbit sat, with lifted forefeet and with ears thrust forward, his face wearing such a look of surprised disapproval as only a rabbit can put on.

One antelope held his head up and listened while the rest were drinking. He turned his head and looked around him, and in every direction he could see an extraordinary collection of white or whitening bones, large and small. Perhaps, year after year, many over-thirsty animals had rushed hastily in and drank too much of that snow-water. At all events, they had ended their days there. The antelope, or anybody else, could also have said to himself, "Tomato-cans? Empty sardine-boxes? Bottles? Old wheels? I wonder how many and what kind of white men or Indians have camped around Fonda des Arenas?" If he had been an American antelope, however, he would have said Cold Spring, and not Fountain of the Sands.

The antelopes were divided as to their nationality, and changed their citizenship several times, for, right through the middle of the spring and along the little rill by which it ran across the rock lay the boundary line between the United States and Mexico. Some curious chisel-marks in one place had meanings with reference to the boundary, and so it must have been there; but even the keen eyes of two buzzard eagles, soaring overhead, could not have seen the line itself.

Suddenly the antelope chief gave a bleat and a bound, and in a twinkling he and his little band disappeared in the southern chaparral. Every one of them had fled into Mexico.

Only ears as sensitive as their own could have heard any warning in what seemed the almost painful silence of that solitude, but they were right in running away. Not many minutes elapsed before several of the paths opening towards the spring were occupied by stealthy human forms on foot, peering around as if to make sure that no other human beings had arrived before them. They answered one another with low calls which sounded like suppressed barks of a prairie-wolf, and these were repeated in the chaparral behind them.

Then a tall, broad, dignified man, in a red flannel waist-cloth and a gorgeous cocked hat, and with red stocking-legs on his arms, strode out towards the bubbling fountain with the air of a ruler taking possession.

"Kah-go-mish is a great chief!" he remarked, emphatically. "Cheat pale-face a heap. Ugh!"

If other remarks made by himself and by a dusky throng, now pouring out of the chaparral, could have been interpreted, it would have been understood that a plan of Kah-go-mish for escaping from some pursuit or other had thus far worked well, but that the danger was by no means at an end.

Wah-wah-o-be was one of those who shook their heads about it very wisely. She said very little, and neither Ping nor Tah-nu-nu was with her. If she knew where they were she did not even mention that fact.

There was plenty of room for the whole band of Kah-go-mish, horses and all. They had travelled since the dawn of day, or before, and although it was still quite early they were hungry and thirsty.

There was the spring for thirst, and fires were kindled. These were as quickly put out, after breakfast had been cooked and eaten, and when the sun had dried the waters thrown upon the embers no newcomer could have guessed how long it might be since the last coal died.

"Leave heap sign," said Kah-go-mish. "Paleface know great chief been here. Not know where gone. Ugh!"

Sign enough was made, for now the band moved away westerly by a path of the chaparral. Broad and plain was the trail left behind and it was all on Mexican sand. It went right along until it reached and crossed another wide path at right angles. Here most of the band turned to the left, under orders, but the rest, a lot of warriors, went on, making false trail as if for a purpose, half a mile farther, to a wide, empty patch of hard gravel. No two of the warriors left that patch together, and the trail died there. Of the band which turned to the left, at the crossing, the squaw part pushed on while some cunning old braves worked like beavers to scratch out every trace that they or theirs had entered that left-hand path at all.

It was all a very artistic piece of Indian dodging, and when it was completed the entire band of Kah-go-mish was encamped in a secluded nook of the chaparral about a mile and a half from the spring. So far as any tracks they had made were concerned, they would have been about as hard to find as the sage-hen, who had now returned to her place under the bush by the spring, and had distinguished company to help her watch it.

A sage-hen crouching low in sand and shadowed by wait-a-bit thorn twigs is pretty well hidden. So is a great Apache chief when he has left his cocked hat and his horse a mile and a half away and is lying at full length, in a rabbit path, a few yards behind the sage-hen.

Kah-go-mish had his own military reasons for hurrying back to play spy, and his face wore an expression of mingled cunning, patience, and self-satisfaction. Something like a crisis had evidently arrived in his affairs, and he was meeting it as became a Mescalero-Apache statesman of genius. He and the sage-hen lay still for a while, but it was not long before there was another arrival at the spring.

No sound escaped the lips of Kah-go-mish, but the expression of his face changed suddenly.

Perhaps the new arrival had been long in convincing himself that he could safely venture to the spring, but he now left his pony at the edge of the quartz level and walked on to the water's edge. He was not a white man. He was one of the Indians who had said "How" to Vic and Mrs. Evans, and the sight of him seemed to arouse all the wolf in Kah-go-mish. The eyes of the Mescalero leader glistened like those of a serpent as he thrust his rifle forward. There was a sharp report and Kah-go-mish bounded from his cover, knife in hand, for the Chiricahua scout lay lifeless upon the rock.

"To-da-te-ca-to-da no more be heap eyes for blue coat," said the ferociously wrathful chieftain, and a moment later, as he again disappeared in the chaparral, he added, bitterly: "Heap sign now. Ugh. Pale-face find him. Bad Indian! Ugh!"

Chapter XV.

LOST IN THE CHAPARRAL

Kah-go-mish and all the other members of his band except two had been entirely absorbed in the marching and counter-marching required to make other people lose track of them. Meantime the two exceptions had been threading the blind paths of the chaparral more rapidly and a great deal more anxiously.

Neither of the ponies which carried Ping and Tah-nu-nu was hampered by any saddle, and both were somewhat wild, but they were not wild enough to have an antelope's learning as to the streets and lanes of that bushy wilderness. Their young riders were just as ignorant. After the fight with the cougar, Ping remembered that when Tah-nu-nu sent her last arrow into the side of the great cat she had seemed to him to be about twice her ordinary size. Her bow had twanged at the moment when he had himself felt like a very small boy indeed, about to be stepped upon by the worst claws in the world. She, at that moment, had thought of her brother as a young warrior and a hero. Now, however, they were even, for they both had lost their way; and she spoke of him as a mere boy, while he described her as a little squaw, from whom, of course, any great amount of wisdom was hardly to be expected. Whether they rode fast or slow, up one path or down another, seemed to make little difference. They were in a complete puzzle, and there were a number of square miles of it.

At last an avenue of more than ordinary width seemed to offer a promise that it might lead somewhere in particular, instead of everywhere in general, and Ping remarked: "Ugh! Heap trail," as he rode into it.

"Buffalo trail," added Tah-nu-nu, satirically, and she was right, but it was the best highway they had yet discovered.

On they rode, for a while, making fewer turns and windings, until they came to a problem which halted them. The wide path split into two that were equally wide, and made a good place for a lost Apache boy and girl to argue a knotty question. Tah-nu-nu favored the right-hand road while Ping preferred the left, and neither of them could give a good reason for any choice.

After Ping killed the cougar, the heart of it had been given him for breakfast and the tongue for dinner, but, whatever else he had gained by eating them, he had not acquired that animal's natural-born bush wisdom. He may at some time have eaten an antelope's ear, however, for he now put up his hand as if another bullet had whizzed past him.

"Ugh!" he exclaimed. "Hear pony! Tah-nu-nu, come!"

They wheeled their own ponies behind the nearest thick bushes and dismounted. The newcomer might be a friend, but he was just as likely to be an enemy. Ping got an arrow ready, and felt very much like a young cougar waiting for an opportunity to spring.

They had only a minute to wait, and then another exceedingly puzzled young person drew his rein at the point where the wide path divided. Ping's eyes opened wide and they glittered enviously. Never before had he seen so dashing-looking a young paleface, nor any kind of boy mounted upon such a beauty of a horse. Oh, how the son of Kah-go-mish did long to become the owner of that red mustang.

"Dick," said the boy in the saddle, very much as if he had been talking to another human being, "did you know that you and I had lost our way? How do you suppose we shall ever get out of this scrape? It's a bad one."

Dick neighed discontentedly, and pawed the sand, for he was thirsty, but he made no other answer. He was as ignorant as was his master concerning those roads and of what was at that moment taking place among the bushes.

The Mescalero branch of the great Apache nation, while at war with Mexico, was at peace with the United States, although it was by means of a treaty which had been badly cracked, if not broken, upon both sides. As for The-boy-whose-ear-pushed-away-a-piece-of-lead, however, he felt in all his veins that he was at war with the entire white race, and that he wanted that red mustang.

His arrow was on the string, and he was lifting his bow, when Tah-nu-nu caught him firmly by the arm.

"Ugh!" she whispered. "Kah-go-mish say no kill. No fight blue-coat. No take 'calp. Ping no shoot."

The too eager young warrior struggled a little, but Tah-nu-nu was determined. Then he seemed to assent, and she let go of his arm while they both listened to something more that the white boy said. They could not quite understand the words, but they could read the decision he came to.

"Dick," he remarked, "here goes. We'll take to the right, if it leads us to China."

With the guiding motion of his hand the red mustang sprang forward. Just as he did so, a fiercely driven arrow whizzed by the head of his master. It only missed its mark by a few inches, and they had been gained for Cal by the quick hand of Tah-nu-nu.

"Indians!" was the exclamation that sprang to Cal's lips. "An ambush."

He rode on rapidly a little distance, and then he pulled in his pony, adding: "Things are getting pretty bad for us, Dick."

"Ugh!" Ping had said, as Cal disappeared. "Tah-nu-nu make him lose arrow. Lose pony. Heap squaw!"

"Kah-go-mish say, good!" she sharply responded. "Heap mad for kill."

She had saved the life of the young pale-face stranger, and she felt sure of her father's approval. She had heard him give his warriors rigid orders against unnecessary bloodshed. He had specified blue-coats and cowboys with thoughtful care for the future of his band, if not for the treaty, but he had said nothing at all about Chiricahua scouts.

Ping was compelled to yield the point, but it was plain to both of them that if there were more pale-faces to the right, for that one to follow after, their own course must be to the left. Down that path they rode, accordingly, and they were going right and wrong at the same time.

Cal Evans, on the other hand, was going altogether in the wrong path, and was doing it pretty rapidly. It occurred to him that buffaloes marching two abreast must have laid out that bush-bordered lane, but then other lanes as wide ran into it or crossed it. He at last brought Dick down to an easy canter and tried to study the situation carefully. He had heard of experienced plainsmen who had lost themselves in chaparral. They had wandered around aimlessly, for days and days, crossing their own trails again and again. At last they had lost hope and had lain down and died of hunger and thirst at only short distances from friends who were hunting for them.

Cal's heart beat hard as he recalled those terrible stories. The sun seemed to be growing hotter overhead. The wind had almost died out, and the air was like that of a furnace. He was painfully thirsty, and he knew that Dick had had no water since daylight, and then not a full supply, for the expedition had been in the desert since the previous afternoon. They had all travelled rapidly, too, in the hope of reaching Cold Spring early.

"What will father say," thought Cal, "when he finds out that I'm missing? What would mother and Vic say, if they knew? I only rode ahead a little way, and I can't guess how I came to lose track of them all."

No man who gets lost can ever tell exactly how he managed to do it.

Very mocking were the curves of that seeming road to nowhere, and many were the narrower lanes that entered it as if they also wanted to go there. Cal could hardly have guessed how many sultry miles he travelled before he came suddenly upon a wider, sandier path, bordered by taller bushes, that struck straight across the other.

"It's time for us to try something new, Dick," he said, but he said it dolefully, as he turned to the left and pushed down the unknown avenue. It had its curves, like the other, and it was wider here and narrower there, and it led him on for a full hour. He had long since almost forgotten about the whizzing arrow, in his deep anxiety, and he knew that there could not be ambushes everywhere.

At the end of the long hour he and Dick stood stock-still. They were on a slight elevation from which a considerable sweep of the chaparral could be overlooked. It was a dreary, dreary prospect, and it seemed to be interminable. Cal stared wistfully in all directions, but north and south and east and west appeared to be alike without hope. Into that lonely path no other human being was likely to come. Dick and Cal were like flies, caught in the vast web. In spite of the glowing sunshine, all things seemed to be growing very dark indeed, and they even grew darker when his feverish imagination wandered away to Santa Lucia.

"It's a fact, Dick," he said, huskily, "you and I are lost."

Chapter XVI.

AN INVASION OF TWO REPUBLICS

Kah-go-mish was a great chief, and had employed all the cunning in him in his arrangements for eluding his pursuers. It now remained to be seen whether or not he had made blunders.

The Chiricahua scout lay on the white quartz only a few yards from the water's edge. The sage-hen sat under the bush. The Apache leader lay once more in his rabbit-path behind her, having regained it by a long circuit through the chaparral.

The two buzzards overhead were floating somewhat lower, and they could see all over the tangled maze of scrubby growth and buffalo-paths.

From the southward came a soft, warm wind, carrying with it sounds which brought a quick, vindictive gleam into the eyes of Kah-go-mish. First came the faint, distant music of a bugle, as if to inform both friends and enemies that a cavalry column was picking its way through the spider-web. A little later shouts could be heard, and then the rattle of sabres and the neighing of horses. Nearer and nearer drew the assurance that quite a lot of fellows of some sort were at hand, and all the while the buzzards overhead, and they only, were aware that a very different-looking set were approaching from another direction.

This second party was also armed and mounted, but it plodded on in silence and not rapidly. They seemed disposed to feel their way with some care, although not at all in doubt as to the path they were following. Part of these silent horsemen were all the way from Fort Craig, hunting some Mescaleros who had left their Reservation, and the rest of them were from Santa Lucia ranch and its neighborhood, and had come for some stolen horses. Just now many of them seemed disposed to discuss the military tactics of Mexican commanders.

"All the Indians in the chaparral have had good bugle-warning, Sam," said Colonel Evans to the cowboy nearest.

"Colorado!" said Sam. "Reckon they have. But then no redskins nor anybody else 'd stop here long. We know one thing, though."

"What's that, Sam?"

"Well, if our redskins are here away, they've been raced out of Mexico. We'll get 'em on American sile."

That appeared to be the opinion of Captain Moore, but the entire party had a hot, thirsty, jaded look, as of men and horses who had made a long push across a desert and wanted rest and water.

"We'll try and reach the spring first," said the captain, "and claim our first choice of a camping-ground."

That was why neither of the two bodies of cavalry got there first, and why Kah-go-mish and the sage-hen heard, pretty soon, an American cavalry bugle from the east answering the Mexican music from the south.

Then the buzzards overhead saw men in uniform and other men in no uniform ride out of the chaparral, from opposite sides, into the great rocky open around the spring.

Just before that Kah-go-mish had seen three Chiricahuas steal out from the cover. They had scouted all around it, and one of them had passed very near the lurking Mescalero. He had been in no danger, for Kah-go-mish had heard the bugles and knew that he must lie still. All three were now grouped around their lost comrade on the rock.

"Ugh!" they said, as they looked at him. "Kah-go-mish."

Captain Moore had been informed of the name of the chief whose band had wandered from the Reservation, and now the Chiricahuas were in no doubt as to whose work lay before them. It was part of an old personal feud, they said, and had nothing to do with pale-faces or stolen horses.

Straight to the margin of the spring rode Captain Moore and the Mexican commander, each followed by several other riders, while behind them their men filed out of the chaparral.

The meeting of the two officers was ceremoniously polite, and was followed by rapid explanations that left them in little doubt but that they were pursuing the same enemy.

"Señor," said Captain Moore, with a smile, at last, as he looked around, "your forces have invaded the territory of the United States."

"Señor Capitan," smiled the Mexican, with a low bow, "part of the troops under your command have broken the treaty and are now in Mexico."

"I propose, then, Colonel Romero," said the captain, "that we compromise the matter. My command is almost thirsty enough to drink up the American half of this spring. How are your own?"

"Dry as the sand," would have been a fair interpretation of the polite Mexican's reply, and orders were given on both sides which provided for the thirsty men and animals without delay.

There were pleasant-voiced introductions among the gentlemen, and the blue-coats and cowboys mingled freely with the lancers and rancheros. If Kah-go-mish did not know it before, he now learned that these Mexicans, of whom there were nearly two hundred, were not the same force that he had collected his target-fee from.