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Like roosting eagles the warriors of Mangus Colorado scanned the wide plains beneath the mountains. Their eyes went to the ragged summits of the ranges beyond. Now as the day was creeping across the long, flat reaches of the Sulphur Springs valley, tipping the scarred crests of the Dragoons with light off to the west, touching the distant northern pinnacles of the Grahams with throbbing radiance, one of these lookouts beheld a thread of smoke unraveling against the bright morning sky.

Under the newly-risen sun Cochise and his followers were traveling hard away off there to the northward. The turbaned warriors came on first, half-naked, armed some of them with lances, some with bows and poisoned arrows, and a goodly number bearing rifles. Their lank brown legs moved ceaselessly in rhythm with the trotting of the little ponies; their moccasined heels thudded against the flanks of the animals.

In the rear of the column the squaws rode with the children and the scanty baggage. As they traveled thus, an outrider departed from the column to leave his horse upon an arid slope and climb afoot among the rocks above until he stood outlined against the clear hot sky, kindling a wisp of flame. Now he bent over the fire, casting bits of powdered resin upon the blaze, holding a square of tattered blanket over it after the first puff of black smoke had risen, feeding it then with a scattering of green leaves which in their turn gave forth a cloud of white fumes.

And so the smoke thread unwound its length, showing itself in black and white; spelling forth, by the same system of dot and dash which the white man employs in his telegraph, the tidings of what had taken place back there in the Sibley tent.

From his nook in the Chiracahuas the watching warrior read its message. And long before the first faint haze of mounting dust betrayed the approach of the fugitives, Mangus Colorado knew that his nephew and his nephew’s people had quit the reservation and the rations of meat and flour to make their living henceforth, as their savage forebears had made theirs as far back as the memory of the oldest traditions went–by marauding. So he gathered all his forces and welcomed Cochise into a council, where they planned their first series of raids against the white men.

In this manner Cochise reverted to the customs of his ancestors; customs which had come gradually to the Apaches when they wandered down from Athabasca, passing southward through regions held by hostile tribes snatching their sustenance from these enemies, fleeing before superior forces of warriors, until they reached the flaming deserts down by the Mexican border, past-masters of the arts of ambush and raid and retreat, owning no longer any love of home or knowledge of tepee building; nomads who made their lodges by spreading skins or blankets over the tops of bushes which they had tied together; to whom the long march had become an ingrained habit and all the arts of bloody ambush an instinctive pleasure.

Now he devoted all his mind and bent his talents to these wiles of Apache warfare; he directed his young men in making a living for the rest of the tribe by theft and murder.

His uncle, Magnus Colorado, was the most skilful leader the Apaches had ever known, a marvelously tall savage with an enormous head. Cochise learned from him and in time surpassed him as a general. For nearly a decade and a half he made a plunder ground of southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, extending his forays away down across the line into Sonora and Chihuahua until a remarkable man among his white enemies came to him, and by a daring bit of frontier diplomacy, put an end to the bloodiest outbreak in the history of the Southwest.

But in the beginning there was neither diplomat nor general among the white men. The days before the Civil War witnessed a withdrawal of the troops from Arizona, and the Apaches had things very much their own way. From their home in the Chiracahua Mountains they rode westward across the wide reaches of the Sulphur Springs valley to the ridges of the Catalinas away beyond the San Pedro, then turned southward, making their way toward Mexico by the Whetstone and the Huachuca ranges.