going save by
the wagon-track.

Felix slipped his arm around his wife and kissed her. It was perhaps
the first time he had done it in years; one can easily believe that.
He kissed the children.

"Whip 'em up," he bade the woman. "I'll hold the road for you."

And he jumped off of the buckboard with his rifle and sixteen rounds
of ammunition.

In Prescott the woman told the story and a relief party rode out
within a half-hour. They found the body of the short-card man and
stock-thief with the bodies of fourteen Indians sprinkled about among
the rocks. And the surviving Apaches, instead of mutilating the
remains of their dead enemy as was their custom on such occasions, had
placed a bandanna handkerchief over his face, weighting down its
corners with pebbles lest the wind blow it away.

It was near Prescott--only four miles below the village--that a woman
fought Apaches all through a long September afternoon. The Hon. Lewis
A. Stevens was in town attending a session of the Territorial
Legislature and his wife was in charge of the ranch near the Point of
Rocks that day in 1867. A hired man was working about the place.

One hundred yards away from the house an enormous pile of boulders
rose toward the nearer hills. Beneath some of the overhanging rocks
were great caves, and the depressions between the ridges gave
hiding-places to shelter scores of men.

Shortly after noon Mrs. Stevens happened to look from the window of
the kitchen where she was at work. Something was moving behind a clump
of spiked niggerheads between the back door and the corrals; at first
glance it looked like a dirty rag stirring in the wind, but when the
woman had held her eyes on it a moment she saw, among the bits of rock
and the thorny twigs with which it had been camouflaged, the folds of
an Apache warrior's head-gear.

Now as she stepped back swiftly from the window toward the
double-barreled shotgun which was a part of her kitchen furnishings
and always hung conveniently among the pots and pans, she caught sight
of more turbans there in her back yard. With the consummate patience
of their kind some twenty-odd Apaches had been spending the last hour
or so wriggling along the baked earth, keeping to such small cover as
they could find as they progressed inch by inch from the boulder hill
toward the ranch-house.

The majority of the savages were still near the pile of rocks when
Mrs. Stevens threw open her kitchen door and gave the warri