PAGE 6
One Against Many
by
One hundred yards away from the house an enormous pile of boulders rose toward the nearer hills. Beneath some of the overhanging rocks were great caves, and the depressions between the ridges gave hiding-places to shelter scores of men.
Shortly after noon Mrs. Stevens happened to look from the window of the kitchen where she was at work. Something was moving behind a clump of spiked niggerheads between the back door and the corrals; at first glance it looked like a dirty rag stirring in the wind, but when the woman had held her eyes on it a moment she saw, among the bits of rock and the thorny twigs with which it had been camouflaged, the folds of an Apache warrior’s head-gear.
Now as she stepped back swiftly from the window toward the double-barreled shotgun which was a part of her kitchen furnishings and always hung conveniently among the pots and pans, she caught sight of more turbans there in her back yard. With the consummate patience of their kind some twenty-odd Apaches had been spending the last hour or so wriggling along the baked earth, keeping to such small cover as they could find as they progressed inch by inch from the boulder hill toward the ranch-house.
The majority of the savages were still near the pile of rocks when Mrs. Stevens threw open her kitchen door and gave the warrior behind the niggerheads one load of buckshot; and the more venturesome among them who had been following their luckless companion’s lead broke back to that shelter at the moment she fired. Fortunately the hired man was out in the front and the roar of the shotgun brought him into the house on a run. By this time more than twenty Apaches were firing from the hill; the tinkling of broken glass from the windows and the buzzing of bullets was filling the intervals between the banging of their rifles.
Like most Arizona ranch-houses in those days, the place was a rather well-equipped arsenal. By relaying each other at loading Mrs. Stevens and the hired man managed to hold down opposite sides of the building. Thus they repelled two rushes; and when the enemy made an attempt to reach the corrals and run off the stock, they drove them back to their hillside a third time.
The battle lasted all the afternoon until a neighbor by the name of Johnson who had heard the firing came with reenforcements from his ranch. That evening after the savages had vanished for good Mrs. Stevens sent a message into Prescott to her husband.
“Send me more buckshot. I’m nearly out of it,” was what she wrote.
During the late sixties and the seventies the stage-lines had a hard time of it, what with Apaches driving off stock and ambushing the coaches along the road. There were certain stations, like those at the Pantano Wash and the crossing of the San Pedro, whose adobe buildings were all pitted with bullet-marks from successive sieges; and at these lonely outposts the arrival of the east or west bound mail was always more or less of a gamble.
Frequently the old thorough-brace Concord would come rattling in with driver or messenger missing; and on such occasions it was always necessary to supply the dead man’s place for the ensuing run. Yet willing men were rarely lacking, and an old agent tells how he merely needed to wave a fifty-dollar bill in the faces of the group who gathered round at such a time to secure a new one to handle the reins.
In those days an Indian fight wasn’t such a great matter if one bases his opinion on the way the papers handled one of them in their news columns. Judge by this paragraph from the “Arizonian,” August 27, 1870:
On Thursday, August 18, the mail buggy from the Rio Grande had come fifteen miles toward Tucson from the San Pedro crossing when the driver, the messenger, and the escort of two soldiers were killed by Apaches. The mail and stage were burned. Also there is one passenger missing who was known to have left Apache Pass with this stage.