Reminiscences of Indian Scouting [pp. 151-169]

Reminiscences of Indian Scoutting.
Tiz-win surprised me once and I surprised him back so that we were both
even. We were scouring the recesses
of the Miembres, and one day, in one of
the wildest, came upon the log cabin of
a lonely settler, who was in truth lost in
the wilderness, and camped on a hillside
a short distance above the house. By
this time I was so tired of bear meat,
venison, and wild game generally, that
common pork and beans, of which we
were completely out, would have been
blessings. Tiz-win had heard my repinings in regard to dietetics, and having
seen turkeys in the settler's corral, he
determined to surprise me with one of
them roasted. I was lying reading on my
blanket in my kennel of a dog tent when
he came up with a large tin pan covered
w.vith a newspaper.
"N outon," he shouted, "get up, ugashe right away! Here's a civilized Chiricahua,- eat him quick before him gets
cold!" And raising the newspaper he
showed me a fine golden gobbler in the
middle of the pan, surrounded by a row
of nice yellow potatoes swimming in appetizing gravy.
I obeyed my subordinate at once, and
one by one the potatoes disappeared
and the turkey's size became less and
less, with Tiz-win looking on approvingly.
While eating, my eyes happening to
drop down on the greasy newspaper,
caught a familiar phrase, in which I recognized my own construction, and I
picked it up and began to read. I had
written, some time before, a ghostly,
non-ghastly kind of sketch for the OVERLAND, which some Eastern weekly had
reprinted, and here was my gentle ghost
in the cabin of one of life's castaways
in the wild Miembres, doing its best to
make the wilderness bloom mentally
while the settler did it physically.
It gave me a good example to follow,
and with all the old numbers I could
spare of the OVERLAND, which I had
brought along as reading matter, togeth
er with the newspaper, I started down
the hill to the settler's cabin after eating
my turkey, in order to pay him for it,
and present him with the copies of the
grizzly. He was overjoyed at receiving
them. He smoothed the newspaper,
folded it up neatly, and laid it carefully
away upon a shelf together with the magazines. "Stranger," said he, "You're
welcome to the bird and the taters and
I'm blanked glad you've brought my
paper back. I was in a hurry, else it
never would have gone up the hill with
theturkeythroughmy mistake. There's
a blanked good ghost story in it. It's
none of your bloody-jaws and bare-bones
things that break a man's heart by trying to make him believe that after working himself to death to get a living in
this world, he'11 have to drag a ball and
chain round in the other, and come back
here with it on his hind foot to frighten
his friends to death. It makes you feel
there's something good a-coming. Sit
down and read it and see for yourself?"
I thanked him and said that I had read
it already.
"Did you now? Well, what d' you
think of it?"
I replied that my opinion might possibly be prejudiced in its favor, for I had
written it myself.
The way the man stared at me from
head to foot and back again after receiving thatinformation left me no doubt
whatever as to his opinion of me. He
thought I was the biggest liar in the
Miembres.
I did not blame him, for by this time
my own mother would not have recognized or acknowledged me for her son.
In general outward appearance I had become an Apache from head to foot, and
Tiz-win had filled me so full of Indian
stories, medicine-man wisdom, and
Apache old-folk lore that I felt like one,
and was almost afraid to go about alone
in the dark, for he had stationed a ghost
to greet me behind every rock and bush
I came across,- let alone the fact (for
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[August,