or behind
the niggerheads one load of buckshot; and the more venturesome among
them who had been following their luckless companion's lead broke back
to that shelter at the moment she fired. Fortunately the hired man was
out in the front and the roar of the shotgun brought him into the
house on a run. By this time more than twenty Apaches were firing from
the hill; the tinkling of broken glass from the windows and the
buzzing of bullets was filling the intervals between the banging of
their rifles.

Like most Arizona ranch-houses in those days, the place was a rather
well-equipped arsenal. By relaying each other at loading Mrs. Stevens
and the hired man managed to hold down opposite sides of the building.
Thus they repelled two rushes; and when the enemy made an attempt to
reach the corrals and run off the stock, they drove them back to their
hillside a third time.

The battle lasted all the afternoon until a neighbor by the name of
Johnson who had heard the firing came with reenforcements from his
ranch. That evening after the savages had vanished for good Mrs.
Stevens sent a message into Prescott to her husband.

"Send me more buckshot. I'm nearly out of it," was what she wrote.

During the late sixties and the seventies the stage-lines had a hard
time of it, what with Apaches driving off stock and ambushing the
coaches along the road. There were certain stations, like those at the
Pantano Wash and the crossing of the San Pedro, whose adobe buildings
were all pitted with bullet-marks from successive sieges; and at these
lonely outposts the arrival of the east or west bound mail was always
more or less of a gamble.

Frequently the old thorough-brace Concord would come rattling in with
driver or messenger missing; and on such occasions it was always
necessary to supply the dead man's place for the ensuing run. Yet
willing men were rarely lacking, and an old agent tells how he merely
needed to wave a fifty-dollar bill in the faces of the group who
gathered round at such a time to secure a new one to handle the
reins.

In those days an Indian fight wasn't such a great matter if one bases
his opinion on the way the papers handled one of them in their news
columns. Judge by this paragraph from the "Arizonian," August 27,
1870:

On Thursday, August 18, the mail buggy from the Rio Grande had
come fifteen miles toward Tucson from the San Pedro crossing when
the driver, the messenger, and the escort of two soldi