"Miss Majesty," said Stillwell, "in the early days the Indians
made this country a bad one to live in. I reckon you never heerd
much about them times. Surely you was hardly born then. I'll
hev to tell you some day how I fought Comanches in the Panhandle-
-thet was northern Texas--an' I had some mighty hair-raisin'
scares in this country with Apaches."

He told her about Cochise, chief of the Chiricahua Apaches, the
most savage and bloodthirsty tribe that ever made life a horror
for the pioneer. Cochise befriended the whites once; but he was
the victim of that friendliness, and he became the most
implacable of foes. Then, Geronimo, another Apache chief, had,
as late as 1885, gone on the war-path, and had left a bloody
trail down the New Mexico and Arizona line almost to the border.
Lone ranchmen and cowboys had been killed, and mothers had shot
their children and then themselves at the approach of the Apache.
The name Apache curdled the blood of any woman of the Southwest
in those days.

Madeline shuddered, and was glad when the old frontiersman
changed the subject and began to talk of the settling of that
country by the Spaniards, the legends of lost gold-mines handed
down to the Mexicans, and strange stories of heroism and mystery
and religion. The Mexicans had not advanced much in spite of the
spread of civilization to the Southwest. They were still
superstitious, and believed the legends of treasures hidden in
the walls of their missions, and that unseen hands rolled rocks
down the gullies upon the heads of prospectors who dared to hunt
for the lost mines of the padres.