Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/197

 of the party only two escaped, one a woman named Shephard, and the other a man named Kruger, both badly wounded.

General Crook was soon satisfied that this terrible outrage had been committed by a portion of the irreconcilable element at the Date Creek Agency, but how to single them out as individuals and inflict the punishment their crime deserved, without entailing disaster upon well-meaning men, women, and babies who had not been implicated, was for a long while a most serious problem. There were many of the tribe satisfied to cultivate peaceful relations with the whites, but none so favorably disposed as to impart the smallest particle of information in regard to the murder, as it was no part of their purpose to surrender any of their relatives for punishment.

It would take too much time to narrate in detail the "patient search and vigil long" attending the ferreting out of the individuals concerned in the Loring massacre; it was a matter of days and weeks and months, but Crook knew that he had the right clew, and, although many times baffled, he returned to the scent with renewed energy and determination. The culprits, who included in their ranks, or at least among their sympathizers, some very influential men of the tribe, had also begun, on their side, to suspect that all was not right; one of them, I understood, escaped to Southern California, and there found work in some of the Mexican settlements, which he could do readily as he spoke Spanish fluently, and once having donned the raiment of civilization, there would be nothing whatever to distinguish him from the average of people about him.

Word reached General Crook, through the Hualpais, that when next he visited Camp Date Creek, he was to be murdered with all those who might accompany him. He was warned to be on the look-out, and told that the plan of the conspirators was this: They would appear in front of the house in which he should take up his quarters, and say that they had come for a talk upon some tribal matter of importance; when the General made his appearance, the Indians were to sit down in a semi-*circle in front of the door, each with his carbine hidden under his blanket, or carelessly exposed on his lap. The conversation was to be decidedly harmonious, and there was to be nothing said that was not perfectly agreeable to the whites. After the "talk" had progressed a few minutes, the leading conspirator would