bliss to every note of the fife and drum. Members of the guard
were always sure of sympathetic spectators during the one regular
ceremony--guard-mounting--held just after sunset, for the Apache prisoners
at the guard-house begged to be allowed to remain without the prison room
until a little after the "retreat" visit of the officer of the day, and,
roosting along the guard-house porch, to gaze silently forth at the little
band of soldiery in the center of the parade, and there to listen as
silently to the music of the fife and drum. The moment it was all over they
would rise without waiting for directions, and shuffle stolidly back to
their hot wooden walls. They had had the one intellectual treat of the day.
The savage breast was soothed for the time being, and Plume had come to the
conclusion that, aside from the fact that his Indian prisoners were better
fed than when on their native heath, the Indian prison pen at Sandy was not
the place of penance the department commander had intended. Accessions
became so frequent; discharges so very few.

Then there was another symptom: Sentries on the north and east front,
Nos. 4 and 5, had been a bit startled at first at seeing, soon after
dawn, shadowy forms rising slowly from the black depths of the valley,
hovering uncertainly along the edge of the _mesa_ until they could
make out the lone figure of the morning watcher, then slowly,
cautiously, and with gestures of amity and suppliance, drawing
gradually nearer. Sturdy Germans and mercurial Celts were, at the
start, disposed to "shoo" away these specters as being hostile, or at
least incongruous. But officers and men were soon made to see it was
to hear the morning music these children of the desert flocked so
early. The agency lay but twenty miles distant. The reservation lines
came no nearer; but the fame of the invader's big maple tom-tom (we
wore still the deep, resonant drum of Bunker Hill and Waterloo, of
Jemappes, Saratoga, and Chapultepec, not the modern rattle pan
borrowed from Prussia), and the trill of his magical pipe had spread
abroad throughout Apache land to the end that no higher reward for
good behavior could be given by the agent to his swarthy charges than
the begged-for _papel_ permitting them, in lumps of twenty, to trudge
through the evening shades to the outskirts of the soldier castle on
the _mesa_, there to wait the long night through until the soft
tinting of the eastward heavens and the twitter of