Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/66

 wanderer. The last few bounds measured twenty-two feet, and then there were signs of a struggle, and of having been dragged off through the chapparal and over the rocks, and that was all.

Our men were ready for the scout, and so were those of the detachment of "K" Troop, First Cavalry, who were to form part of our expedition—a gallant troop and a fine regiment.

The quarters were all in bustle and confusion, and even at their best would have looked primitive and uncouth. They were made of unhewn logs set upright into the ground and chinked with mud, and roofed in the same early English style, with the addition of a ceiling of old pieces of canvas to keep the centipedes from dropping down.

On the walls were a couple of banjos, and there were intimations that the service of the troop had been of a decidedly active nature, in the spoils of Apache villages clustered against the cottonwood saplings. There were lances with tips of obsidian, and others armed with the blades of old cavalry sabres; quivers of coyote and mountain lion skin filled with arrows, said by the Mexican guides to be poisonous; and other relics of aboriginal ownership in raw-hide playing-cards, shields, and one or two of the century-plant fiddles.

The gloom of the long sleeping room was relieved by the bright colors of a few Navajo blankets, and there hung from the rafters large earthenware jars, called "ollas," the manufacture of the peaceful Papagoes, in which gallons of water cooled by rapid evaporation.

There were no tin wash-basins, but a good substitute was found in the pretty Apache baskets, woven so tightly of grasses and roots that water could no more leak through them than it could through the better sort of the Navajo blankets. A half a dozen, maybe more, of the newspaper illustrations and cartoons of the day were pasted in spots where they would be most effective, and over in the coolest corner was the wicker cage of a pet mocking-bird. There were other pets by this time in the Apache children captured in the skirmishes already had with the natives. The two oldest of the lot—"Sunday" and "Dandy Jim"—were never given any dinner until they had each first shot an arrow into the neck of an olive-bottle inserted into one of the adobe walls of the