Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/492

 attempt to arrest one of their young men for some trivial offence. The Chiricahuas found no fault with the arrest in itself, but were incensed at the high-handed manner in which the chief of police had attempted to carry it out: the young buck started to run away and did not halt when summoned to do so by the chief of police, but kept on in his retreat among a crowd of children and squaws. The chief of police then fired, and, his aim not being good, killed one of the squaws; for this he apologized, but the Chiricahuas got it into their heads that he ought not to have fired in the first place; they dissembled their resentment for a few days until they had caught the chief of police, killed him, cut off his head, played a game of football with it, and started for the Mexican boundary in high glee.

Crook's expedition passed down through the hamlets of Huachinera, Basaraca, and Bavispe, Sonora, where occurred the terrible earthquake of the next year. Mexican eye-witnesses asserted that the two or three ranges of mountains which at that point form the Sierra Madre played hide-and-seek with each other, one range rising and the others falling. The description, which had all the stamp of truth, recalled the words of the Old Testament: "What ailed thee, O sea, that thou didst flee? And thou, O Jordan, that thou wast turned back? Ye mountains, that ye skipped like rams; and ye hills, like the lambs of the flock?"

General Crook was about this time made the target of every sort of malignant and mendacious assault by the interests which he had antagonized. The telegraph wires were loaded with false reports of outrages, attacks, and massacres which had never occurred; these reports were scattered broadcast with the intention and in the hope that they might do him injury. Crook made no reply to these scurrilous attempts at defamation, knowing that duty well performed will in the end secure the recognition and approval of all fair-minded people, the only ones whose recognition and approval are worth having. But he did order the most complete investigation to be made of each and every report, and in each and every case the utter recklessness of the authors of these lies was made manifest. Only one example need be given—the so-called "Buckhorn Basin Massacre," in which was presented a most circumstantial and detailed narrative of the surrounding and killing by a raiding party of Apaches of a small band of miners, who were forced to seek safety in a cave