Adventure Magazine Cover — page 62: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

f} Cochise was a weird design of black shadows, a de- sign which was constantly shifting and taking on new shapes. And as the shadows moved, sometimes with grotesque effect and swiftly, sometimes slowly, voices fil- tered through the gleaming cloth to mingle with the whispering of the night wind in the bear grass, the dull stamping of tethered horses, the intermittent jingling of bit chains and the steady soft footfalls of two sentries. The voices changed as often as the shad- ows on the tent wall; now it was the ab- rupt, clipping speech of a white man and now the deep inflectionless bass of an In- dian. But most often it was the droning monotone of the post interpreter, uttering his translations in English or in the tongue of the Apache. Of what was taking place within those luminous walls of canvas, official records still exist; and of what followed there are whole volumes of further records in Wash- ington. Dry reading in themselves, they hold the meat of a remarkable story, a story whose colorful narration has been given by its own main characters and thus has come down among the true chronicles of the old- timers. On that evening in 1859 ,two groups of men faced each other and the lantern which hung on the center-pole of the Sibley tent shone down on their faces, revealing the growing passion in their eyes. One of the groups was composed of soldiers, wear- ing the blue uniforms, the queer straight- vizored caps and the huge wide-topped boots which our cavalry used during those times; a guard of sunburnt troopers under a hard-bitten non com; and standing a pace or so ahead of them, a young second lieutenant’ fresh from West Point; Lieutenant Bascom, @ stranger in a strange, harsh land, just a little puzzled over the complications which he saw arising here, but dead sure of himself and intolerant of the men with whom he was treating. That intolerance showed in his stare as he regarded them. There were half a dozen of the Apaches, chiefs every one of them, a ragged group clad in a mixture of their native garb and cast-off clothes of the white man; frowzy hair hanging to their shoulders and bound - yound at the brows by soiled thin turbans. ¥ JRA 77 ve! AM ALLY Bae a aout I Vc Eber 1501.2 PROT OS NY “i : Ye ry ’ - Pat | : " ie : . , : But they stood erect and there was a dig- nity in the way they held their heads back, a dignity in their immobility of feature and 61. in their slow, grave speech. It was the dignity of men who knew that they were leaders of their people; who felt themselves on entire equality with the leader of the white man’s warriors; who felt the gravity of this occasion where they had been invited into conference with this blue-clad repre- sentative of a mighty Government. Their headman was Cochise. Like Lieutenant Bascom, he stood a pace ahead of his followers, a lean Apache, with a thinner face than most of his tribesmen and a remarkably high forehead. And as he looked into the eyes of the young man in blue who had just come from the far cities of the east coast there began to come into his own eyes the shadow of suspicion. The talk went on; the interpreter droned out one answer after another to his speeches and that shadow in the eyes of Cochise deepened. In itself the matter at issue was a small one. A settler had lost a cow and he had accused the Apaches of stealing the animal. Young Lieutenant Bascom had summoned the chiefs to conference and they had come —they said—to help him find the culprit. After the manner of the Indian, of whose troubles the passing of time is the very least, they talked slowly, listened to the in- terpreter’s renditions of the lieutenant’s answers, and then talked more. They did not know the man who had stolen the cow; that was the sum and sub- stance of their speeches. And Lieutenant Bascom, fretting with the passage of the hours, looked on the ragged group in their dirty nondescript garments and chafed with fresh intolerance. Cochise read that intolerance in the eyes of the smooth-cheeked officer and being an Apache, managed to conceal the suspicion in his own eyes. He did not want trouble with the white man. He had never yet had trouble with soldier or settler. Ever since he had been a chief among the Chira- cahua Apaches_he had held down the tur- bulent spirits in his portion of the tribe; he had outintrigued savage politicians and had smoothed over more than one difficulty like this. As a matter of fact he was as- similating some of the white man’s ways; he was getting into business; working a crew of his people at wood-cutting, selling cord- wood to the stage company at the Stein’s Pass station. He was doing well, saving money, and saw ahead of him the time CoOPMicloookSs (S@)