Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/169

 as nearly perfect as they ever have been or can be in our army history. Last, but not least, we learned the country—the general direction of the rivers, mountains, passes, where was to be found the best grazing, where the most fuel, where the securest shelter. Some of the command had had a little experience of the same kind previously, but now we were all in attendance at a perambulating academy, and had to answer such questions as the general commanding might wish to propound on the spot.

Side scouts were kept out constantly, and each officer, upon his return, was made to tell all he had learned of the topography and of Indian "sign." There was a great plenty of the latter, but none of it very fresh; in the dim distance, on the blue mountain-tops, we could discern at frequent intervals the smoke sent up in signals by the Apaches; often, we were at a loss to tell whether it was smoke or the swift-whirling "trebillon" of dust, carrying off in its uncanny embrace the spirit of some mighty chief. While we slowly marched over "playas" of sand, without one drop of water for miles, we were tantalized by the sight of cool, pellucid lakelets from which issued water whose gurgle and ripple could almost be heard, but the illusion dissipated as we drew nearer and saw that the mirage-fiend had been mocking our thirst with spectral waters.

Our commanding general showed himself to be a man who took the deepest interest in everything we had to tell, whether it was of peccaries chased off on one side of the road, of quail flushed in great numbers, of the swift-walking, long-tailed road-runner—the "paisano" or "chapparal cock," of which the Mexicans relate that it will imprison the deadly rattler by constructing around its sleeping coils a fence of cactus spines; of tarantulas and centipedes and snakes—possibly, some of the snake-stories of Arizona may have been a trifle exaggerated, but then we had no fish, and a man must have something upon which to let his imagination have full swing; of badgers run to their holes; of coyotes raced to death; of jackass-rabbits surrounded and captured; and all the lore of plant and animal life in which the Mexican border is so rich. Nothing was too insignificant to be noted, nothing too trivial to be treasured up in our memories; such was the lesson taught during our moments of conversation with General Crook. The guides and trailers soon found that although they who had been born and brought up in that vast region could tell