An Apache Princess - Charles King (readict books .TXT) 📗

he dawn of another cloudless day was breaking and the dim lights at the guard-house and the hospital burned red and bleary across the sandy level of the parade. The company cooks were already at their ranges, and a musician of the guard had been sent to rouse his fellows in the barracks, for the old-style reveille still held good at many a post in Arizona, before the drum and fife were almost entirely abandoned in favor of the harsher bugle, by the infantry of our scattered little army. Plume loved tradition. At West Point, where he had often visited in younger days, and at all the "old-time" garrisons, the bang of the morning gun and the simultaneous crash of the drums were the military means devised to stir the soldier from his sleep. Then, his brief ablutions were conducted to the accompaniment of the martial strains of the field musicians, alternating the sweet airs of Moore and Burns, the lyrics of Ireland and Auld Reekie, with quicksteps from popular Yankee melodies of the day, winding up with a grand flourish at the foot of the flagstaff, to whose summit the flag had started at the first alarum; then a rush into rattling "double quick" that summoned the laggards to scurry into the silently forming ranks, and finally, with one emphatic rataplan, the morning concert abruptly closed and the gruff voices of the first sergeants, in swift-running monotone, were heard calling the roll of their shadowy companies, and, thoroughly roused, the garrison "broke ranks" for the long routine of the day.

We have changed all that, and not for the better. A solitary trumpeter steps forth from the guard-house or adjutant's office and, at the appointed time, drones a long, dispiriting strain known to the drill books as "Assembly of the Trumpeters," and to the army at large as "First Call." Unassisted by other effort, it would rouse nobody, but from far and near the myriad dogs of the post—"mongrel, hound, and cur of low degree"—lift up their canine voices in some indefinable sympathy and stir the winds of the morning with their mournful yowls. Then, when all the garrison gets up cursing and all necessity for rousing is ended, the official reveille begins, sounded by the combined trumpeters, and so, uncheered by concord of sweet sounds, the soldier begins his day.

The two infantry companies at Sandy, at the time whereof we tell, were of an honored old regiment that had fought with Worth at Monterey—one whose scamps of drum boys and fifers had got their teachings from predecessors whose nimble fingers had trilled the tunes of old under the walls of the Bishop's Palace and in the resounding Halls of the Montezumas. Plume and Cutler loved their joyous, rhythmical strains, and would gladly have kept the cavalry clarions for purely cavalry calls; but reveille and guard-mounting were the only ones where this was practicable, and an odd thing had become noticeable. Apache Indians sometimes stopped their ears, and always looked impolite, when the brazen trumpets sounded close at hand; whereas they would squat on the sun-kissed sands and listen in stolid, unmurmuring bliss to every note of the fife and drum. Members of the guard were always sure of sympathetic spectators during the one regular ceremony—guard-mounting—held just after sunset, for the Apache prisoners at the guard-house begged to be allowed to remain without the prison room until a little after the "retreat" visit of the officer of the day, and, roosting along the guard-house porch, to gaze silently forth at the little band of soldiery in the center of the parade, and there to listen as silently to the music of the fife and drum. The moment it was all over they would rise without waiting for directions, and shuffle stolidly back to their hot wooden walls. They had had the one intellectual treat of the day. The savage breast was soothed for the time being, and Plume had come to the conclusion that, aside from the fact that his Indian prisoners were better fed than when on their native heath, the Indian prison pen at Sandy was not the place of penance the department commander had intended. Accessions became so frequent; discharges so very few.

Then there was another symptom: Sentries on the north and east front, Nos. 4 and 5, had been a bit startled at first at seeing, soon after dawn, shadowy forms rising slowly from the black depths of the valley, hovering uncertainly along the edge of the mesa until they could make out the lone figure of the morning watcher, then slowly, cautiously, and with gestures of amity and suppliance, drawing gradually nearer. Sturdy Germans and mercurial Celts were, at the start, disposed to "shoo" away these specters as being hostile, or at least incongruous. But officers and men were soon made to see it was to hear the morning music these children of the desert flocked so early. The agency lay but twenty miles distant. The reservation lines came no nearer; but the fame of the invader's big maple tom-tom (we wore still the deep, resonant drum of Bunker Hill and Waterloo, of Jemappes, Saratoga, and Chapultepec, not the modern rattle pan borrowed from Prussia), and the trill of his magical pipe had spread abroad throughout Apache land to the end that no higher reward for good behavior could be given by the agent to his swarthy charges than the begged-for papel permitting them, in lumps of twenty, to trudge through the evening shades to the outskirts of the soldier castle on the mesa, there to wait the long night through until the soft tinting of the eastward heavens and the twitter of the birdlings in the willows along the stream, gave them courage to begin their timid approach.

And this breathless October morning was no exception. The sentry on the northward line, No. 4, had recognized and passed the post surgeon soon after four o'clock, hastening to hospital in response to a summons from an anxious nurse. Mullins seemed far too feverish. No. 4 as well as No. 5 had noted how long the previous evening Shannon and his men kept raking and searching about the mesa where Mullins was stabbed in the early morning, and they were in no mood to allow strangers to near them unchallenged. The first shadowy forms to show at the edge had dropped back abashed at the harsh reception accorded them. Four's infantry rifle and Five's cavalry carbine had been leveled at the very first to appear, and stern voices had said things the Apache could neither translate nor misunderstand. The would-be audience of the morning concert ducked and waited. With more light the sentry might be more kind. The evening previous six new prisoners had been sent down under strong guard by the agent, swelling the list at Sandy to thirty-seven and causing Plume to set his teeth—and an extra sentry. Now, as the dawn grew broader and the light clear and strong, Four and Five were surprised, if not startled, to see that not twenty, but probably forty Apaches, with a sprinkling of squaws, were hovering all along the mesa, mutely watching for the signaled permission to come in. Five, at least, considered the symptom one of sufficient gravity to warrant report to higher authority, and full ten minutes before the time for reveille to begin, his voice went echoing over the arid parade in a long-draw, yet imperative "Corporal of the Gua-a-rd, No. 5!"

Whereat there were symptoms of panic among the dingy white-shirted, dingy white-turbaned watchers along the edge, and a man in snowy white fatigue coat, pacing restlessly up and down in rear, this time, of the major's quarters, whirled suddenly about and strode out on the mesa, gazing northward in the direction of the sound. It was Plume himself, and Plume had had a sleepless night.

At tattoo, by his own act and direction, the major had still further strained the situation. The discovery of Blakely's watch, buried loosely in the sands barely ten feet from where the sentry fell, had seemed to him a matter of such significance that, as Graham maintained an expression of professional gravity and hazarded no explanation, the major sent for the three captains still on duty, Cutler, Sanders, and Westervelt, and sought their views. One after another each picked up and closely examined the watch, within and without, as though expectant of finding somewhere concealed about its mechanism full explanation of its mysterious goings and comings. Then in turn, with like gravity, each declared he had no theory to offer, unless, said Sanders, Mr. Blakely was utterly mistaken in supposing he had been robbed at the pool. Mr. Blakely had the watch somewhere about him when he dismounted, and then joggled it into the sands, where it soon was trampled under foot. Sanders admitted that Blakely was a man not often mistaken, and that the loss reported to the post trader of the flat notebook was probably correct. But no one could be got to see, much less to say, that Wren was in the slightest degree connected with the temporary disappearance of the watch. Yet by this time Plume had some such theory of his own.

Sometime during the previous night, along toward morning, he had sleepily asked his wife, who was softly moving about the room, to give him a little water. The "monkey" stood usually on the window sill, its cool and dewy surface close to his hand; but he remembered later that she did not then approach the window—did not immediately bring him the glass. He had retired very late, yet was hardly