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We tried to call him back, and he thought it was the Apaches after him. I reckon he 's scared you-all half to death with his yarn. You 're as bad as tenderfeet yourselves! "But they 'd got the notion scared into them so bad they could n't believe anything else, and they sure thought there must be Injuns around somewheres; and so I left 'em and rode on for Apache Teju.
So that was how the Kid came to live at Apache Teju. He said his name was Guy Silvestre Raymond. But whether a mother's lips had really bestowed that name upon him, or he had appropriated it to himself out of some blood-and-thunder romance, whose hero he had decided to imitate, name and all, is one of the things that nobody but the Kid will ever know.
And on one foot clanked and jingled the pride and glory of his attire a huge spur, three inches long, silver-plated and highly polished, and so heavy that that foot dragged as he walked. He repeated his question, and the superintendent's wife leaned forward, with a laughing aside to me: "You tenderfoot! Haven't you learned our brand yet?" And to the boy: "Yes, this is Apache Teju.
I 'll get him sure buffaloed, and if he don't pull his freight before he 's a day older, there 'll be the biggest killing here that Apache Teju ever heard of." It was very quiet the next day at the ranch. Mr. and Mrs. Williams and Madge had driven to Silver City, the cowboys were all on the range, and I kept in my room with some work.
The chuck wagon was right behind us, and he give one jump and went clean over it and lit out across country like an antelope. You-all just ought to 've seen that tenderfoot pull his freight! "The boys come up a-laughin' and watched him run. They was a-bettin' he would n't stop till he got to Apache Teju, but I said it was n't right to buffalo him that bad.
All his life had been spent along its line, blacking boots, selling nuts, candy, papers, on the trains or around the depots of the frontier cities and towns. And he had taken care of himself ever since he could remember. He had reached Deming a few days before in a worse but less picturesque state of dilapidation than that in which he presented himself at Apache Teju.
And that is Apache Teju, headquarters for the northern half of a ranch that spreads over seven thousand square miles of the arid hills and plains of southern New Mexico, where for hours and hours you may travel toward a horizon swimming in heat, across the gray, hot, quivering levels, broken only by clumps of gay-flowered cactus and the blanching bones and sun-dried hides of cattle, dead of starvation and thirst.
So we-all yelled and called him to come back, but he only run the faster. The durn fool tenderfoot thought it was the Apaches chasin' him! We-all thought he 'd soon find out there was nothin' wrong a-tall and come back, and so we went to bed again. But he did n't. "The next day I had to come to Apache Teju and I found Pard Huff's bloody tracks most all the way to Separ.
Then our train sped on again through the wondrous night, and I knew no more about the Indian war at Separ until I sat on the kitchen doorstep at Apache Teju, one evening some years later, and beguiled Texas Bill into telling me yarns of his long and checkered experience as a cowboy.
And when you draw rein under the cottonwoods at Apache Teju, uncurl the wrinkles of your eyelids in the welcome shade, and cool your eyes in the vivid green of the alfalfa field, it suddenly comes to you that never before did you understand what blessedness there is in a bit of shadow and a patch of green things growing.
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