,
he found that pleasure would not come to him; and during the long
hours that followed, the groans of the slowly dying Mexican became a
punishment to his savage captor, a punishment which endured for years
afterward, for in his sleep Cochise sometimes heard those moanings
when he was an old man, and hearing them sweated in agony of mind.

Another of his peculiarities was a love of the truth. He was no hand
at lying like the ordinary Indian. In an era when the white men were
careless with their compacts, an era when Washington set the fashion
in breaking treaties with the hostile Indians, he came out with the
reputation of always keeping his word.

"If you can not tell the truth," he said, "keep silent or avoid the
subject."

That was the way he put it to Captain Thomas Jonathan Jeffords, to
whom he also confessed the weakness which had overcome him in the case
of the tortured Mexican. And the knowledge of this side of Cochise's
character helped Captain Jeffords to pave the way for the wind-up of
the war-chief's maraudings. That knowledge came after a long strange
intimacy which began in a remarkable manner.

This Captain Thomas Jonathan Jeffords owned a wagon outfit and not
only contracted for government freighting in those times when teaming
was a perilous venture, but rode as an express messenger for various
military posts along the border. During the days when Cochise was
using the northern end of the Dragoon Mountains as his stronghold, the
days before these two men became acquainted, the lean brown warriors
made several attacks on Jeffords's wagon-trains and on more than one
occasion forced the old-timer himself to do some extremely hard
riding.

Finally when he had lost fourteen employees and property amounting to
thousands of dollars in ambuscades and raids, Jeffords decided that it
was high time to put an end to this sort of thing as far as he was
concerned. He had tried reprisals on his own account but although he
and his leather-skinned followers had managed to kill off numerous
Apaches, there were more warriors in the tribe than he could ever hope
to massacre.

He had worked with the soldiers as a scout but had found the cavalry
hampered by too many conflicting orders from Washington, and in some
cases too inefficiently officered in high places, to be very
formidable. Cochise was too much for them to handle and that was all
there was about it. Now he made up his mind to try a new scheme.

Captain J