Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/52

 spare my readers. There were the hot embers of the new wagons, the scattered fragments of broken boxes, barrels, and packages of all sorts; copper shells, arrows, bows, one or two broken rifles, torn and burned clothing. There lay all that was mortal of poor Israel, stripped of clothing, a small piece cut from the crown of the head, but thrown back upon the corpse—the Apaches do not care much for scalping—his heart cut out, but also thrown back near the corpse, which had been dragged to the fire of the burning wagons and had been partly consumed; a lance wound in the back, one or two arrow wounds—they may have been lance wounds, too, but were more likely arrow wounds, the arrows which made them having been burned out; there were plenty of arrows lying around—a severe contusion under the left eye, where he had been hit perhaps with the stock of a rifle or carbine, and the death wound from ear to ear, through which the brain had oozed.

The face was as calm and resolute in death as Israel had been in life. He belonged to a class of frontiersmen of which few representatives now remain—the same class to which belonged men like Pete Kitchen, the Duncans, of the San Pedro; Darrel Duppa and Jack Townsend, of the Agua Fria; men whose lives were a romance of adventure and danger, unwritten because they never frequented the towns, where the tenderfoot correspondent would be more likely to fall in with some border Munchausen, whose tales of privation and peril would be in the direct ratio of the correspondent's receptivity and credulity.

It was now too dark to do anything more, so we brought up Kennedy, who seemed in such good spirits that we were certain he would pull through, as we could not realize that he had been hit by an arrow at all, but tried to console him with the notion that the small round hole in his chest, from which little if any blood had flown, had been made by a buck-shot or something like it. But Kennedy knew better. "No, boys," he said sadly, shaking his head, "it's all up with me. I'm a goner. I know it was an arrow, 'cause I broke the feather end off. I'm goin' to die."

Sentinels were posted behind the bushes, and the whole command sat down to keep silent watch for the coming of the morrow. The Apaches might double back—there was no knowing what they might do—and it was best to be on our guard. The old rule of the frontier, as I learned it from men like Joe Felmer, Oscar Hutton, and Manuel Duran, amounted to this: