Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/202

 *of the full-blooded aborigine, with all the cunning, shrewdness, contempt for privation and danger, and ability to read "sign," that distinguish the red men. It was his wont at the appearance of the new moon, when raiding parties of Apaches might be expected, to leave his house, make a wide circuit in the mountains and return, hoping to be able to "cut" the trail of some prowlers; if he did, he would carefully secrete himself in the rocks on the high hills overlooking his home, and wait until the Apaches would make some movement to let him discover where they were and what they intended doing.

He was a dead shot, cunning as a snake, wily and brave, and modest at the same time, and the general belief was that he had sent twenty-seven Apaches to the Happy Hunting Grounds. Townsend and Boggs, his next-door neighbor who lived a mile or two from him, had made up their minds that they would "farm" in the fertile bottom lands of the Agua Fria; the Apaches had made up their minds that they should not; hence it goes without saying that neither Townsend nor Boggs, nor any of their hired men, ever felt really lonesome in the seclusion of their lovely valley. The sequel to this story is the sequel to all such stories about early Arizona: the Apaches "got him" at last, and my friend Townsend has long been sleeping his last sleep under the shadow of a huge bowlder within a hundred yards of his home at the "Dripping Springs."

The antipodes of Townsend's rancho, as its proprietor was the antipodes of Townsend himself, was the "station" of Darrel Duppa at the "sink" of the same Agua Fria, some fifty miles below. Darrel Duppa was one of the queerest specimens of humanity, as his ranch was one of the queerest examples to be found in Arizona, and I might add in New Mexico and Sonora as well. There was nothing superfluous about Duppa in the way of flesh, neither was there anything about the "station" that could be regarded as superfluous, either in furniture or ornament. Duppa was credited with being the wild, harum-scarum son of an English family of respectability, his father having occupied a position in the diplomatic or consular service of Great Britain, and the son having been born in Marseilles. Rumor had it that Duppa spoke several languages—French, Spanish, Italian, German—that he understood the classics, and that, when sober, he used faultless English. I can certify to his employment of excel