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Updated: May 21, 2025
My old guide, Al Doyle of Flagstaff, had led me over half of Arizona, but never down into that wonderful wild and rugged basin between the Mogollon Mesa and the Mazatzal Mountains. Doyle had long lived on the frontier and his version of the Pleasant Valley War differed markedly from that of Mr. Adams. I asked other old timers about it, and their remarks further excited my curiosity.
Once well up among the rocks of the Mazatzal, after sunrise, these valued allies became bewildered and gave out, were handed a canteen and ration of crackers apiece and left to limp back to the shack, while Turner pushed on. They were at the store, recuperating, when his people reappeared at Almy, and each had derisive and uncomplimentary things to say of the other.
The eastern side of the river is also closely confined, though not so closely as the western, by a chain of mountains known as the Mazatzal range.
The village did not occupy the whole of the mesa point on which it is located; on the east the ground rises gently to the foothills of the Mazatzal range, and on the south and west it slopes sharply down to the little creek before mentioned; while on the north there is a terrace or flat open space some 60 feet wide and almost parallel with the longer axis of the village.
"You don't know how it is, Greenbrier. It's so comfortable here that " "Please loan me your smelling salts," pleaded Greenbrier. "If I hadn't seen you once bluff three bluffers from Mazatzal City with an empty gun in Phoenix " Greenbrier's voice died away in pure grief. "Cigars!" he called harshly to the waiter, to hide his emotion. "A pack of Turkish cigarettes for mine," said Merritt.
It was this situation he had been puzzling over when at ten P.M. the officer of the day came in to say that new signal fires in the east were now being answered by others in the west, away over in the Mazatzal, and the general went forth to the northern edge of the "bench" to have a good look at them, wishing very much he had Stannard or Turner or "Capitan Chiquito" little Harris to help him guess their meaning.
Sanchez started in the lead, afoot, and, in spite of his fear of Tontos, kept it all the way to the Mazatzal, where, as was later learned, he abandoned the paths of rectitude and the trail to Almy, and joining a party of twenty young renegades, complacently watched the coming of that sergeant and detachment from behind the sheltering bowlders of Dead Man's Cañon, and thus it happened that the orders Archer had been expecting three long days and nights were destined never to get to him.
They were climbing a rugged, stony ravine now, with bare shoulders of bluff overhanging in places, and presently, from a projecting ledge, Stannard was able to look back over the rude landscape of the lowlands. There to the west, stretching north and south, was the long, pine-crested bulwark of the Mazatzal, the deep, ragged rift of Dead Man's Cañon toward the upper end.
But the Archers came sooner than any one about Prescott deemed likely at all. Somebody said, and more than one somebody thought, that Mrs. Archer had had more than a hint as to what was going on. But never did Mrs. Archer look or admit it. The mail riders had resumed their trips. The paymaster had made his visit to McDowell and had safely traversed the Mazatzal and distributed his shekels at Almy.
Then presently the Springfields began deliberate reply, only an occasional shot, for only very rarely did so much as the tip of a turban appear, and then the sun had dropped below the Mazatzal and the valley was in shadow, and old Archer stood with grim, whimsical smile on his weather-beaten face, as, field-glass to his eyes, he scanned his outposts at the south where the firing seemed heaviest.
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