Stewart Edward White

“ So I ran down the hill and into the shack. Johnny sat in his chair—what there was of him. He must have got in about two hours before sundown, for they'd had lots of time to put in on him. That 's the reason they'd stayed so long up the draw. Poor old Johnny! I was glad it was night, and he was dead. Apaches are the worst Injins there is for tortures. They cut off the bottoms of old man Wilkins's feet, and stood him on an ant-hill——
In a minute or so, though, my wits gets to work.
"Why ain't the shack burned?" I asks myself, "and why is the hoss and the mule tied all so peaceful to the corral?" ”

“ The army is nothing but an importer of stolen stock, and knows it, and can't help it.
Well, as I says, I'm between Camp Apache and the Mexican line, so that every raiding party goes right on past me. The point is that I'm a thousand feet or so above the valley, and the renegades is in such a devil of a hurry about that time that they never stops to climb up and collect me. Often I've watched them trailing down the valley in a cloud of dust. Then, in a day or two, a squad of soldiers would come up and camp at my spring for a while. ”

“ It did n't take long for a man who knows Injins to answer those conundrums. The whole thing was a trap—for me—and I'd walked into it, chuckle-headed as a prairie-dog!
With that I makes a run outside—by now it was dark—and listens. Sure enough, I hears hosses. So I makes a rapid sneak back over the trail.
Everything seemed all right till I got up to the rim-rock. Then I heard more hosses—ahead of me. And when I looked back, I could see some Injuns already at the shack, and starting to build a fire outside.
In a tight fix, a man is pretty apt to get scared till all hope is gone. ”