ng fires over
them, and bake them. Thus they got the sugar which their wasted bodies
needed; and during the days at these camps they gained the rest which
their aching bones craved.

But the white man's cavalry, guided by scouts recruited from the Touto
Basin Apaches and from settlers who knew the country, began tracking
the renegades to their aerial refuges, and sometimes massacred whole
bands of them. Failing to steal upon them, the cavalry always managed
to get them on the run once more, and that meant scant rations when
full bellies were long overdue.

In this manner the soldiers and the settlers were making the
Chiracahuas too hot for Cochise and his people.

Then the war-chief led his tribe across the Sulphur Springs valley
to the northern end of the Dragoon Mountains where the peaks rise
straight from the mesquite flat lands, two thousand feet of sheer
walls whose summits command a view for many miles; whose pinnacles
and overhanging rocks give endless opportunity for hiding and
ambush. In this sanctuary they found rest between raids during the
early seventies; and the place is known to this day as Cochise's
Stronghold.

Here one time a force of several hundred soldiers made camp in the
lowlands, and strung a series of strong outposts through Middle Pass,
cutting off the northern part of the range from all the rest of the
world, holding it inside a ring of armed men. It was such a siege as
the warriors of the Middle Ages used to wage, starving their walled-in
enemies to surrender. For weeks the soldiers bided and sometimes got
glimpses of the turbaned heads of Apache warriors who were gazing down
on them from the rocks above.

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 o