Читать книгу Through Apache Land - Ellis Edward Sylvester - Страница 10

Lone Wolf spoke English like a native; and, having waited until the admiration of Ned Chadmund had been given time to expend itself, he spoke in a deep, guttural voice:

"Does the child of my white brother mourn for those who have fallen?"

The lad was so surprised at hearing himself addressed in this manner, that he stared wonderingly at him for a moment without making reply. Then he rose to his feet, and, looking up in the painted face, replied:

"I am all alone, and long to go to my father."

"What is the name of your father?" asked the chief, in the same excellent English.

"Colonel Edward Chadmund."

"Is he at the fort, yonder?" continued Lone Wolf, stretching out his hand so as to point toward the southwest.

"Yes; he is the commandant there, and has a large number of brave soldiers, and will send them out to take me to him."

Had Ned been a few years older, he would not have made this reply. It was not politic to threaten the chief; and he had no suspicion that the confession of the identity of his father only intensified the hatred of these redskins before him. But perhaps, after all, it was as well; for Lone Wolf was sagacious enough to recollect that he was talking to a child, from whom he was more likely to hear truth than from an older person.

"He has sent some brave soldiers to take you to him," said the chief, with a wolf-like grin, displaying his long, yellow teeth. "But they have left you on the way; they have given you to Lone Wolf, and they will not go back to the fort, nor to Santa Fe. If he sends more, they will do the same."

"There were only a dozen of them, while you had hundreds. If they had had anything like an equal chance, not one of the Apaches would have been left alive! We would have killed them all!"

This was a brave answer, in a certain sense, but it was not a very prudent one; for Lone Wolf was known to be the possessor of a fearful temper, easily excited into a tempest of passion; and the words of the boy were not calculated to be very soothing to him. There was too much paint upon the face of the chieftain for the boy to observe the flush which overspread it at hearing himself addressed in this manner, but he could understand the lowering of that gruff voice and the quickening of the utterance.

"Lone Wolf and his brave Apaches care nothing for the soldiers of the Father at Washington. His agents deceive us; they make treaties and do not keep them; they lie to us, and then we turn upon and rend them. Do you see that?"

As he uttered this inquiry in the fiercest kind of language, he whipped out from beneath his blanket the reeking scalp of one of the soldiers that had fallen in the gorge a short time before, and shook it in the face of the terrified lad. The latter could not fail to see what it was, and drew back in horror and disgust, realizing what a bloodthirsty monster stood before him. He saw that it would never do to excite the other's anger, and he endeavored to turn the conversation into another channel.

"Do you and your brave warriors mean to stay here till morning?"

"It is as Lone Wolf wills," was the instant answer, in a voice not quite so severe, indicating a subsidence of the troubled waters.

"And what are you going to do with me?" was the next question, which no one besides a lad of Ned's age would have dared to put, when placed in a similar position.

"That, too, is as Lone Wolf wills," was the rather non-committal answer.

"And that is the reason why I asked you. How soon can I return to my father? When I reach him I will tell him that it was Lone Wolf that sent me back and he will be friendly toward him."

"Lone Wolf asks not his friendship," said the chieftain, with something of the old fire gleaming in his eye. "He has killed our bravest and best warriors. He has followed them to the mountains and slain them by their camp fires, when they dreamed not that the white man was near. He has murdered their squaws; and Lone Wolf shall not die until he tears his scalp from his head."

The poor boy was horrified. He was too young to understand fully the causes of such deep enmity upon the part of the chieftain, but he was not too young to understand that his own life had been spared through no sentiment of mercy. The leader had some other cause, but Ned did not see much hope of making a favorable impression upon this intractable chief, and he would have been very much relieved had he taken himself off and left him alone.

Some fifteen minutes had passed since the lad had opened his eyes upon the strange scene by which he was surrounded, and the preparations which seemed to be going on were completed. The entire Apache troop suddenly broke out in a series of whoops and yells that would have appalled a hundred famishing wolves. At the same instant they began dancing – not a motion of the feet, such as we are accustomed to see in civilized regions, but a series of demoniac gymnastics, risking the dislocation of all the bones in their bodies. They leaped up and down, swung their arms, threw out their legs, and circled around each other – the whole forming a wild and appalling revelry more like that of wild beasts than of human beings.