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Then, one dark night, Cochise took his entire tribe, numbering somewhere between two and three hundred men, women, and children, down the niches among the cliffs. Carrying their arms and their scanty baggage, the Apaches wormed their way from the crest to the plain two thousand feet below and crawled through the line of the besiegers. So adroitly was the thing manoeuvered that no one cut their trail, and two days passed before the escape was discovered. By that time the whole band were raiding down along the headwaters of the San Pedro, getting new horses from the herds of ranchers on the border.

In the old days this northern end of the Dragoon Mountains, which towers above the flat lands of the Sulphur Springs valley on the one side and the rolling plains of the San Pedro on the other, had been known among the Apaches as the abode of the dead. Here, they said, the departed spirits of their ancestors whispered among the granite caves and pinnacles every evening with the coming of the night wind.

But from now on they forgot the tribal legends and looked upon the place as their inviolable refuge.

Time after time the blue-clad troopers chased them as far as the base of the cliffs, but never pressed them farther. For Cochise had developed into a consummate strategist and, for the first time in their history, the Apaches learned the art of making a stand against superior forces.

To this day the rolling hills under those pinkish granite precipices show traces of the camps which the troopers occupied during successive sieges, only to abandon them on learning that their turbaned enemies had stolen away in some other quarter to resume their raiding all along the border.

In some of the canyons which lead up toward the ragged crests of naked rock one can still pick up old brass cartridge-shells, the relics of grim battles where the soldiers always found themselves at a disadvantage, targets for the frowzy, naked savages who slipped and squirmed among the granite masses above them like rattlesnakes.

Far to the southward the Sierra Madre reared its lofty crests toward the flaring sky; and there Cochise established another sanctuary where his people could rest and hunt when the chase became too hot in Arizona. His breech-clouted scouts discovered some dry placer diggings here, and he bade the squaws mine the dust which he exchanged with crooked-souled white traders for ammunition.

And now, having mastered the art of flight as he had mastered the art of raiding, the war-chief of the Chiracahua Apaches waged his vendetta against the white men more remorselessly than any of his forefathers had done in their time.

But few men are absolutely consistent and Cochise had some idiosyncracies, which it is just as well to note in passing, for they give an inkling of a side of his character that was instrumental in bringing an end to the whole bloody business.

For one thing he could not enjoy torturing his prisoners. He tried that once on a Mexican down Agua Prieta way. After the custom of his nation he pegged out the luckless prisoner near an ant-hill, with his mouth propped open by a wooden gag and a trail of honey leading into it.

But when he settled down that night to enjoy the torments of the man, he found that pleasure would not come to him; and during the long hours that followed, the groans of the slowly dying Mexican became a punishment to his savage captor, a punishment which endured for years afterward, for in his sleep Cochise sometimes heard those moanings when he was an old man, and hearing them sweated in agony of mind.

Another of his peculiarities was a love of the truth. He was no hand at lying like the ordinary Indian. In an era when the white men were careless with their compacts, an era when Washington set the fashion in breaking treaties with the hostile Indians, he came out with the reputation of always keeping his word.