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Updated: May 1, 2025
Shortly after sunset on this same hot evening the sergeant in charge of the little signal-party at the Picacho came strolling forth from his tent puffing at a battered brier-root pipe.
Presently the half dozen horsemen, who had been with their chief to the Picacho, came trotting forth from the corral, followed by two or three led horses. Strong mounted the first to reach him and sent another to his quarters for Lieutenant Willett. Then Captain Bonner came strolling back as though quite unconcerned.
The gathering darkness, the plash upon his hand, the resemblance to the mountain that guarded his babyhood and youth, all probably had worked their spell, for the pallid lips began to move, and in the silence of the lowering night a few words in his native tongue were faintly heard, and hot tears gushed from the eyes of his young chief, friend and brother, as, in answer to the doctor's quick, questioning glance, Harris brokenly murmured the translation: "When the Picacho hides his head in the clouds, then will there be rain."
And so at midnight, with steeds panting and jaded, with the pass and the Picacho only four miles ahead, the little detachment was tripping noiselessly through the darkness, and, all alert and eager, Drummond was riding midway between his scouts and the main body so that no sound close at hand might distract his attention from hails or signals farther out.
'Twas there they wanted to have you stop, for there you'd have no chance at all. Shure, do you suppose if the Apaches were out if this story was true they wouldn't have heard it and investigated it by this time, and the beacon-fire would have been blazing at the Picacho?"
It was then a little after ten o'clock. The wire to Prescott was still unresponsive. Nothing had been heard from the linesmen and their escort, indicating that the break was probably far over as the Agua Fria. Not a sign, except Stout's signal blazes at the picacho, had been gathered from the front.
"Why, I thought just a moment ago I heard something like the crack of a whip far out there on the plain." "That's mighty strange, sir; no stage is due coming east until to-morrow night, and no stage would dare pull out on this stretch in face of the warning there at Picacho." "Well, it may have been imagination. My nerves are all unused to this sort of thing.
Moreover, the paymaster was coming, which overshadowed all minor considerations, and Turner was to take twenty men and meet him midway over to McDowell, and could have taken fifty had volunteers been called for, and the garrison to a man would have offered to sally forth, "with mattock and with spade" to patch up the crazy road that twisted through Picacho Pass anything to get the man and his money to Camp Almy, for "devil a cent of four months' pay had the garrison, and more than double that," said Sergeant Malloy, "is owin' me in I.O.U.'s that they wouldn't take for a treat at the store."
If Stout made even fair time he should have reached the picacho at dusk, and now it was nearly nine and not a glimmer of fire had been seen at the appointed rendezvous. Nine passed and 9.15, and at 9.30 the fifes and drums of the Eighth turned out and began the long, weird complaint of the tattoo. Nobody wished to go to bed. Why not sound reveille and let them sit up all night, if they chose?
With women and children crowding about him, and men running to the scene from every side, by the light of a lantern held in a soldier's shaking hand, he read aloud the contents: "BIVOUAC AT PICACHO, 9 P. M. "C. O. CAMP SANDY: "Reached this point after hard march, but no active opposition, at 8 P. M. First party sent to build fire on ledge driven in by hostiles.
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