THREE APACHE WOMEN AND A LONE WHITE MAN

DRAWINGS BY TED DE GRAZIA Differing peoples of differing geographical environments, of differing ways of deriving a living from the earth, of differing races, languages, religions, impetuses from learning and impetuses from ignorance, have differing manners; but all, irrespective of border, breed, or birth, have similar instincts, similar emotions, similar compassions and other expressions of basic decencies. No man has ever been born in any form of barbarism or in any form of civilization who could not say with Shy-lock: "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"

Twenty-six years ago a historical novel entitled "Apache," by Will Levington Comfort, was published in New York. Few readers of the narrative I am about to begin can be familiar with the title, but hardly anybody nurtured on the tradition that Apache and heartless cruelty are synonyms could read that moving novel and thenceforth regard the Apache people as he regarded them before reading it. To change the minds of men is not nearly so hard as to subtract from their prejudices.

Whether Charles H. Green originally nursed a hostility toward the Apaches I have no way of knowing. His grand-daughter, Mrs. Barbara Clark Fogel, of Austin, Texas, does not know, and it is from her that I derive all that follows, much in her own words, concerning Green and his adventure with three Apache women.

He was born on a New England farm, where, except for some time spent working on the Erie Canal, he tilled the soil with his father and also aided him in cutting timber for lumber. Timbering was so much more profitable than farming that they moved to Michigan. Here they found rich stands of timber, but other men were finding it too. Accounts of the great forests of Oregon and northern California kept piling up. The elder Green was now growing old and did not want to move again. Charles H. was at the age of discovery and expansion. He went back east, got passage on a ship and sailed around the Horn to the Pacific coast. He found what he wanted, but needed capital and came back home. Then he made a second voyage, but on the return trip the ship nearly went down. He was so miserably seasick for so long a time that he vowed never to sail again. The third trip west he went by stage coach and got across the continent without mishap, though with a lot of misery. He began developing that is, exterminating a big block of virgin forest that he had acquired. Feeling certain of financial comfort for his children and their children, he went to San Francisco to celebrate, which was easy to do in that ray and booming city. This must have been about the time the Civil War began. He had a kind of celebrating nature. His hair had turned white before he was nineteen years old-probably from a vitamin complex rather than from fright. He had cultivated a moustache and goatee that made him look more rakish than venerable and later on suggested comparisons between him and Colonel William Cody. He had high cheek bones, probably derived from a full-blooded Indian ancestress who had married a New England Puritan. This cast of his face may have had some influence on the three Apache women we are coming to later. When he was in fettle he insisted on a topper hat, a satin-lined opera cape and gold-headed ebony cane upon accompanying a lady for evening entertainment. He was interested in many things beyond lumber and money. Late in life, and "in the money," he, for instance, bought one of the first shipments of radium from France to this country and presented it as a "loan" to a doctor who happened to live next door to his home in Saginaw, Michigan. He had married his second wife and settled here, it may be explained, before he made the stage trip west. Whether he took in too much of San Francisco or took in a fly with bacon gravy at some stagestand, he certainly derived an infection from some source before his eastThe bound stagecoach got into Arizona. This sickness was worse than seasickness. His intestines as well as his stomach were affected. The stage was crowded with passengers. It would have to stop for him to get out. His retching beside a window did not brighten the atmosphere-though he was certainly fulfilling to the letter the primary phase of William Hazlitt's prescription for going on a journey: "out of myself and my house I go." For a long distance the passengers and the stage driver were sympathetic. Stops at the stands for changes of horses and for meals-sometimes not much more than fried salt bacon, greasy bread and mustard-were a relief. Green might lie down for a few minutes. But the jolting became a torture to his insides. He began running a high fever and to lose control of himself.

Then in the Apache country the stage came to a relay station that had been burned, the attendants killed and left scalped, the horses taken away. The stagecoach went on. Now travel was torment to even the well, but relief was ahead. No, the next station had been raided and destroyed also. By now Green was delirious, entirely out of his head, too weak to hold up his head, seemingly near death.

Finally all the passengers, their nerves all tattered and torn, agreed that the incubus had as well be put out. They could no longer delay for him. He might stand a better chance to survive anyway if left where he could rest a while. The stagedriver agreed. He stopped the coach in a shadow of a great rock, and here the trouble was lifted out and laid upon the ground, a canteen of water and a hank of jerked beef beside him. The next eastbound stage-due two weeks later-could pick him up or bury him.

After he was put on the ground, Green roused enough to sense, however dimly, what was going on. He insisted that his baggage be put off with him. At least he would not die stripped of all his personal possessions. The stage moved on eastward and he blacked out.

About dusk he came into a dim consciousness. It might have been the day the stagecoach left him somewhere in desert land-he never knew exactly where-or the next day. Perhaps a sound roused him. The first impact on his consciousness when he roused out of a state of prolonged unconsciousness was a feeling, perhaps an intuition, that human beings were near him. He did not at first open his eyes. He became lucid enough to remember that he was in a country where the only company he was likely to have was Apache. He was not yearning for that company. Perhaps, he thought, his delirium had been inventing company. Then he distinctly heard the shuffling of feet and feminine giggling. He opened his eyes, and his nostrils seemed to open about the same time.

Perhaps a sound roused him. The first impact on his consciousness when he roused out of a state of prolonged unconsciousness was a feeling, perhaps an intuition, that human beings were near him. He did not at first open his eyes. He became lucid enough to remember that he was in a country where the only company he was likely to have was Apache. He was not yearning for that company. Perhaps, he thought, his delirium had been inventing company. Then he distinctly heard the shuffling of feet and feminine giggling. He opened his eyes, and his nostrils seemed to open about the same time.

Right by him, bending almost over him, he saw in the clear twilight three distinctly fat, distinctly aromatic in their own way, gaudily clad Indian women. They never did tell him that they were Apaches, and he could not have understood them if they had told him, but they could not have been anybody else. In the old days the Apaches never called themselves Apaches, anyhow; they called themselves a name meaning "the people," very much as contemporary Americans recognize themselves as the most pleasing-to-God of all inhabitants not only of the world but of the "universe."

Green stared at the three women. All three stared at him. Then they giggled again. He afterwards had reason to deduce that their giggles came not so much from childlike response to a novelty as from humane gratification at seeing him revive. They said something to each other. Then the largest of the three bent down, picked him up and slung him over her shoulder lightly and started carrying him off. The other two brought along the luggage that he had insisted on having unloaded with his body.

"They're taking me to their camp for the men to torture before scalping me," he thought. "I wonder if they'll kill before scalping or afterwards. They may make some use of my clothes in the valises, but those land and lumber papers will be Greek to them."

Before long the woman carrying Green and leading the procession began climbing a rise that at first was gentle but soon became very steep. She did not slacken her pace or trouble to shift her burden. The lingering twilight still made visible the mouth of a cave that they came to near the summit of the hill they had ascended. The woman carried him into the cave and deposited him on the ground. The other women deposited his luggage near by. Then all three left. He was utterly exhausted and, also, by now clear-headed.

Within a short time they were back with wood and other things and were building a fire, not big, but sufficient to light the cave. The biggest woman had two blankets, grey from grey wool. She spread one on the ground and lifted him upon it. She hung the other as a curtain at the mouth of the cave. The smoke seemed to go up through a hole in the ceiling. Now a pot with water -he wondered from where-was put on the fire to boil. One of the women seemed to have full charge of it. She put into it bits of bark, some roots, some leaves, a small quantity of what looked like dried berries.

Green watched the proceedings until he smelled the aromatic steam. Then, utterly exhausted from the exertion of being moved, he relapsed into unconsciousness or per-

haps only into a doze. The next thing he knew a woman with a clay cup, without a handle, was rousing him and offering him a drink from it. He could not raise his head; it was raised for him and rested upon an ample lap. The cup was placed to his lips. Suddenly he suspected that it held a poison that would torture him for savage pleasure before the climax of death. He kept his mouth closed, but a pair of steady hands forced his jaws open and, a little at a time, the tea was dribbled down his gullet. His head was put back on the blanket and he fell asleep.

Two or three times during the night he roused with the increasing alertness that comes after a fever lowers. The fire was being kept up enough to furnish a dim light and by it he saw a woman sitting relaxed on the ground. After this it was seldom that he saw more than one of the women at the same time. They took turns in attending him, supplying him with herbs, water, food. He understood that their camp was not a great distance away. As he gained strength and weight and heard an increasing noise from drums he imagined that he was perhaps being conditioned for a special refinement in torture. There was almost no communication between him and the women. Their kindness was utterly impersonal.

The day came when he could walk a little inside the cave. In the dusk a few evenings later the guardian on duty led him to a rock ledge outside and bade him be seated. There he watched fires dotting the earth below and off to one side. The stars seemed more beautiful to him than they had ever been; the smell of sage brush was sweeter than he had ever imagined it could be.

He brought fresh linen from a valise and placed it near the basin. Another drew his gold watch and chain from under her clothing and placed it beside the clean linen. He couldn't swim in the basin of water but he could wash most of himself and did. He always claimed that the women went outside, beyond the blanket door, while he exposed himself. To a primitive of either sex there is nothing either modest or immodest in the bathing exposure of any individual, only a natural procedure.

Anyway, after Green had bathed and put on fresh clothing inside and out, he felt like a new man even if the day of doom was about to dawn. It had not yet dawned when his luggage was brought outside the cave. Water had doused the fire and the blanket had come down. The large woman who had carried him up the hill now took his arm and guided him down it. Dawn was just beginning to break when out on the flat somewhere, well out of sight of the Apache camp, the women made him understand that he was to sit down and wait.

He sat. They seemed to be very merry, as if mightily pleased with themselves. With a final and unmistakeable gesture for him to stay where he was, they disappeared. He stayed and watched the sun come up. Then from the opposite direction he saw dust, and then something approaching. It was a stagecoach-east bound. He was right beside its path. It stopped. The driver of the stage that had put him off had said the next one would either bury him or take him on home. As his city luggage was lifted aboard and he got in, out there in the middle of the desert, looking as fresh as a cucumber and arrayed in fresh linen, the passengers must have been a little curious.

Charles H. Green got home to Saginaw all right and got lots of satisfaction out of life after that, including marrying a third time and begetting four children, one of whom was the mother of the interesting lady who gave me this narrative of her grandfather.