The Colonel's Lady by Clifton Adams Page B

when two or more troopers got together; it dominated all discussion and most of the thinking. And long recitals were heard about Indian torture and savagery.
    Around Tucson it had been Cochise and his Chiricahuas. Or maybe the Pinaleno. And the newspapermen wrote long stories about the Army campaigns against them and sent the stories back east to be printed in the big-city papers. But in the White Mountains it was different. There was no publicity up here, and Army officers avoided Larrymoor like the plague. There was little chance for advancement, and no chance at all for glory. But there were plenty of chances to fight and die, if that was what you were looking for.
    We learned quickly that most of the officers were bitter, with reason, but the men for the most part took it philosophically, for there was no other place for them to go. Some of them—like Morgan, maybe—almost dreaded the day when peace would come to the frontier north of the Gila. It was their last stronghold, too, in the face of the oncoming tide of “civilization,” just as it was with Kohi and his White Mountain Apaches. They fought to the death and showed no quarter, the troopers and the Indians, but they had one thing in common: They both had learned to hate the white settlers now coming into the Arizona country.
    I could see that hate now on Skiborsky's face, for he had already guessed what we would find at the bottom of the grade. The vultures, startled, flapped noisily and rose heavily into the air as we approached. We saw then that it had been an Apache camp—a permanent camp, more or less, for the wickiups had been laid out in orderly rows, like an army camp. The wickiups had all been burned. Burned, and scattered, and hacked, and strewn all over the floor of the valley.
    We found more than twenty fairly new graves at the far end of the camp, the mounds covered with the vulture-cleaned bones of horses. Halan looked shaken, almost sick.
    “Well,” he said flatly, “we know now what Kohi is mad about.”
    It was pretty clear what had happened, but the Captain sent Juan out to scout the nearby valleys before any of us put it into words. It didn't take Juan long to find what he was looking for. He reported that there were traces of a wagon train—twelve to fifteen wagons in it—less than a mile to the east. The trace, Juan guessed, was nearly a month old.
    So the pieces fitted together. The men from the wagon train had attacked the Apache village, burned it, scattered it, killed everybody they could find—women and children and old men, mostly, because the signs showed that the braves had been away at the time of the attack. Hunting, probably. Anyway, the wagon train would never have made the move if the warriors had been there.
    Skiborsky cursed softly as we kicked around through the ashes. “So this is the white man's civilization,” he said bitterly. “You can't blame Kohi much, I guess, for not wanting any part of it.”
    “How about that wagon we saw coming from Tucson?” Morgan said.
    “Part of this same wagon train, probably, that had to stop with a busted axle or something. Whether it was or not wouldn't have made any difference to Kohi, though. His village had already been sacked and burned. His old warriors and women and children already killed. What puzzles me is why he hasn't raised more hell than he has.”
    “Maybe this'll teach him to go back to his reservation and stay there,” Morgan grunted.
    “What would he do on a reservation? They can starve in the summer. And in the winter they can freeze. While the 'Indian experts' in Washington fiddle away time and rob him blind.”
    Halan, hearing that, said, “That's enough of that, Skiborsky.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Juan was grinning widely, for the Papagos and Apaches were bitter enemies. He poked here and there among the burned-out wickiups while Halan got the thing organized enough in his mind to make a report. The vultures circled lazily above us and began to drift away.