Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/232

 would be sure to push on to the other "rancheria," of which we had been told. How they came to escape was this: at the very first streak of light, or perhaps a short time before, they had been sent—six young girls and an old woman—to examine a great "mescal pit" down in the cañon, and determine whether the food was yet ready for use. The Apaches always preferred to let their mescal cook for three days, and at the end of that time would pull out a plug made of the stalk of the plant, which should always be put into the "pit" or oven, and if the end of that plug is cooked, the whole mass is cooked. We had smelt the savory odors arising from the "pit" as we climbed down the face of the cliff, early in the day. John de Laet describes a mescal heap, or a furnace of earth covered with hot rocks, upon which the Chichimecs (the name by which the Spaniards in early times designated all the wild tribes in the northern part of their dominions in North America) placed their corn-paste or venison, then other hot rocks, and finally earth again. This mode of cooking, he says, was imitated by the Spaniards in New Mexico. (Lib. 7, cap. 3.) The Apache-Mojave squaws at the San Carlos Agency still periodically mourn for the death of seventy-six of their people in this cave, and when I was last among them, they told a strange story of how one man escaped from our scrutiny, after we had gained possession of the stronghold.

He had been badly wounded by a bullet in the calf of the left leg, in the very beginning of the fight, and had lain down behind one of the great slabs of stone which were resting against the walls; as the fight grew hotter and hotter, other wounded Indians sought shelter close to the same spot, and after a while the corpses of the slain were piled up there as a sort of a breastwork. When we removed the dead, it never occurred to any of us to look behind the stone slabs, and to this fact the Indian owed his salvation. He could hear the scouts talking, and he knew that we were going to make a rapid march to reunite with our pack-train and with other scouting parties. He waited until after we had started out on the trail, and then made for himself a support for his injured limb out of a broken lance-staff, and a pair of crutches out of two others. He crawled or climbed up the wall of the cañon, and then made his way along the trail to the Tonto Creek, to meet and to turn back a large band of his tribe who were coming down to join "Nanni-chaddi." He saved them from Major Brown,