e heroes
who had held the neck, while they destroyed the bridge.

Then they rode home with the enemy, chaffing each other.

It is only a workaday matter, all this; but workaday stuff does the
business nowadays.

MASSAI'S CROOKED TRAIL

IT is a bold person who will dare to say that a wilder savage ever lived
than an Apache Indian, and in this respect no Apache can rival Massai.

He was a _bronco_ Chiricahua whose _tequa_ tracks were so long and
devious that all of them can never be accounted for. Three regiments of
cavalry, all the scouts--both white and black--and Mexicans galore had
their hack, but the ghostly presence appeared and disappeared from the
Colorado to the Yaqui. No one can tell how Massai's face looks, or
looked, though hundreds know the shape of his footprint.

The Seventh made some little killings, but they fear that Massai was not
among the game. There surely is or was such a person as Massai. He
developed himself slowly, as I will show by the Sherlock Holmes methods
of the chief of scouts, though even he only got so far, after all.
Massai manifested himself like the dust-storm or the morning mist--a
shiver in the air, and gone.

The chief walked his horse slowly back on the lost trail in disgust,
while the scouts bobbed along behind perplexed. It was always so. Time
has passed, and Massai, indeed, seems gone, since he appears no more.
The hope in the breasts of countless men is nearly blighted; they no
longer expect to see Massai's head brought into camp done up in an old
shirt and dropped triumphantly on the ground in front of the chief of
scouts' tent, so it is time to preserve what trail we can.

Three troops of the Tenth had gone into camp for the night, and the
ghostly Montana landscape hummed with the murmur of many men. Supper was
over, and I got the old Apache chief of scouts behind his own ducking,
and demanded what he knew of an Apache Indian down in Arizona named
Massai. He knew all or nearly all that any white man will ever know.

"All right," said the chief, as he lit a cigar and tipped his sombrero
over his left eye, "but let me get it straight. Massai's trail was so
crooked, I had to study nights to keep it arranged in my head. He didn't
leave much more trail than a buzzard, anyhow, and it took years to
unravel it. But I am anticipating.

"I was chief of scouts at Apache in the fall of '90, when word was
brought in that an Indian girl named Natastale had disappeared, a