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Pancho had come from the stage-station with mail; an odour of breakfast issued from the kitchen, where Hop Yet was humming a fragment of Chinese song, that ran something like this, not loud, but unearthly enough, as Bell used to say, to spoil almost any cooking:
The troops along the lines were posted at the forts and stockades about every hundred miles, with a few soldiers distributed at each stage-station. Then scattered along the road were ranches, and relay- and feeding-stations for the regular commercial and supply-trains that were continually on the road.
It gives the procession a chance to spread an' show up. You can't make no funeral imposin' except you're plumb liberal on distances. "It all goes smooth right off the reel. We gets a box an' grave ready, an' Peets sticks up a notice on the stage-station door, settin' the excitement for third-drink time next day.
Every ranch and stage-station from Junction Station to this post is burned, and the charred remains of every inmate who failed to escape tells of the brutality they were subjected to. I telegraphed Hon. Sam H. Elbert, acting Governor of Colorado, early in January of the state of things.
In their wide detour they had endeavored to escape detection from the stage-station, but sheltered by no appreciable inequalities of land, and denied the refuge that even a small grove might have furnished, they had, as it were, been held up to view on the prairie; and though so far away, their horses had been as distinctly outlined as two ants scurrying across a white page. Wilfred reflected.
One against many; that was the rule in these grim fights. But the affair which took place on the Cienega de Souz, fifteen miles above the old San Simon stage-station and twenty-five miles from Port Bowie, tops them all when it comes to long odds. On October 21, 1871, one sick man battled for his life against sixty-odd Apaches and won out.
That is the story as I have frequently heard it told and seen it in print in California newspapers. It is doubtless correct in all essential particulars. In due time we rattled up to a stage-station, and sat down to breakfast with a half-savage, half-civilized company of armed and bearded mountaineers, ranchmen and station employees.
And when the rude cabins and hasty tents of the last stage-station in Greer County showed dark and white against the horizon of a spring-like morning, Wilfred cried exultantly: "The end of the journey!" And Lahoma, suddenly showing in her cheeks all the roses that had opened in her dreams, repeated gaily, yet a little brokenly: "The end of the journey!" The end of the journey meant a wedding.
At the first stage-station out of Comanche, a matter of twenty-five miles, and of fifteen beyond his camp, he made inquiry about Agnes. She had passed there the morning before, the man in charge said, measuring Slavens curiously with his little hair-hedged eyes as he stood in the door of his shanty, half a cabbage-head in one hand, a butcher-knife in the other.
Usually at this particular time they traveled by way of the Santa Catalina Mountains, keeping well to the heights until they reached the Pantano Wash, where they frequently swooped down on the Butterfield stage-station before climbing to the summits of the Whetstones and the Huachucas. Clinging to the rocky ridges, they went on southward and watched the lowlands for signs of victims.
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