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Updated: May 1, 2025
We were to meet at Moreno's this evening; but a scouting-party in the mountains warned us to hide until night, so we're late. Have they reached Moreno's? We must be close there." "You're close enough to Moreno's; it's not a hundred yards back there; but that light across the valley is the warning beacon at Picacho. They would hardly venture across knowing what that means."
He seemed to love to watch the morning flame on the bald summit of the huge peak so close at hand; it made him think of the Picacho about whose base he had sported as a boy. He seemed to love to see Ramon and Pancha hovering ever about him. He would look at them, take their hands, then place their hands together and hold them between his own.
From the Picacho, it seems, both Strong and Bonner had made out through their glasses two tiny black dots in the direction of Bennett's ruined ranch, coming slowly toward the post, but still five or six miles away. From the platform, forty minutes later, two horsemen had distinctly been seen moving swiftly about, close to the willows that lined, in places, the rocky stream bed.
The best view of Tegucigalpa is had from Picacho, a long ridge from back in the mountains, ending in a blunt nose almost sheer above the city. Whoever climbs it recognises the reason for the native saying, "He who holds Picacho sleeps in the palace." Its town-side face is almost precipitous, and on every hand spread rolling, half-bare upland mountains.
He promised to take back the pistol my people found the night I shot his horse, and he never did, nor messages I sent. So I know not who fired the shot, who clubbed him, but Sanchez had that pistol Sanchez lied to me! I was not that night so near as the Picacho, and when the soldiers came to find me I went farther, with two of my people. We met the Great Chief's couriers. We met more Tontos.
"'Out by Picacho!''Scout capitan! Who on earth does he mean?" asked Archer, with a sudden fear at heart. Once again, stumbling question, much gesticulation, many words in strange gutturals and a name. Then the final report: "He means Apache-Mohave 'Tonio!"
Yet what 'Tonio said was translatable only by Harris: "When the picacho hides his head in the clouds, then look for rain." "Lord," said the doctor, "I doubt if ever I've seen a cloud above it much less on it! If it weren't for the creek yonder the whole post would shrivel up and blow away. Even the hygrometer's dead of disuse or dry rot.
I try to convince myself it's only imagination; but two or three times, far out there towards the Picacho, I've heard that whip cracking. I have felt sure there was a hammering sound, as though some one were pounding on a wagon-tire. Once I was sure I heard a horse snort. That I was in a measure expecting.
Not a signal had come from without, not a sign from either command, not a symptom of surrounding Indian; yet a little party sent to search the rookery down stream, where Case declared he'd been entertaining the ghost of 'Patchie Sanchez, came back reporting that fresh moccasin and mule tracks were plainly visible about the premises and at the neighboring ford, also that the mule tracks led away back of the Picacho, as everybody persisted in calling the peak in spite of the fact that from the north it presented no sharp point to the skies, but rather a bold and rounded poll.
The nearest approach to a signal was seen by a corporal of the guard and sentry Number Six an hour after midnight, when, in quick succession, two faint, firefly flashes, unrepeated, were visible afar out due east of the Picacho, and they could have been caused in only two ways somebody experimenting with a mirror and the moonbeams, the moon being then about three hours high and three-quarters full, or else, as they were ruddier than moonshine, somebody taking two quick shots, probably at somebody else.
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