Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/472

 to Camp Apache. Not many of the Apaches were to be seen, and practically none except the very old, the very feeble, or the very young. All the young men who could shoot were hiding in the mountains, and several sharp actions had already been had with the troops: the Third and Sixth Cavalry had had a fight with the renegades from the reservation, and had had two officers—Morgan and Converse, of the Third—severely wounded; Captain Hentig, of the Sixth, had been killed on the Cibicu some months before; and the prospects of peace, upon a permanent and satisfactory basis, were extremely vague and unpromising. But there was a coincidence of sentiment among all people whose opinion was worthy of consultation, that the blame did not rest with the Indians; curious tales were flying about from mouth to mouth, of the gross outrages perpetrated upon the men and women who were trying faithfully to abide in peace with the whites. It was openly asserted that the Apaches were to be driven from the reservation marked out for them by Vincent Collyer and General O. O. Howard, upon which they had been living for more than eleven years. No one had ever heard the Apaches' story, and no one seemed to care whether they had a story or not.

Crook made every preparation for a resumption of hostilities, but he sent out word to the men skulking in the hills that he was going out alone to see them and hear what they had to say, and that if no killing of white people occurred in the meantime, not a shot should be fired by the troops. In acting as he did at this time, Crook lost a grand opportunity for gaining what is known as military glory: he could have called for additional troops and obtained them; the papers of the country would have devoted solid columns to descriptions of skirmishes and marches and conferences, what the military commander thought and said, with perhaps a slight infiltration of what he did not think and did not say; but, in any event, Crook would have been kept prominently before the people. His was not, however, a nature which delighted in the brass-band-and-bugle school of military renown: he was modest and retiring, shy almost as a girl, and conscientious to a peculiar degree. He had every confidence in his own purposes and in his own powers, and felt that if not interfered with he could settle the Apache problem at a minimum of cost. Therefore he set out to meet the Apaches in their own