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.

Now, as they trekked along t