oxen and carried off the woman's boy.

Major Stein was a very good man, and very capable of running a saw-mill
in Missouri, where he came from. He listened to John Ward's tale of woe,
and ordered out a detachment of the First Dragoons, under Lieutenant
Bascomb, to pursue the Apaches and recover Micky Free and the oxen.
Bascomb was a fine-looking young fellow, a Kentuckian, a West Pointer,
and of course a gentleman; but he was unfortunately a fool; although his
uncle, Preacher Bascomb, of Lexington, was accounted a very eminent
clergyman of the Presbyterian Church. This is a very different family
from Bascomb of the Confederate X roads.

Lieutenant Bascomb's command pursued some Apaches, who had been raiding
in Sonora, into the Whetstone Mountains, where they called a parley. The
Apaches were summoned to camp _under a white flag_; and feeling
perfectly innocent of having committed a crime against the Americans,
fearlessly presented themselves before Lieutenant Bascomb and his boys
in blue. They positively denied having seen the boy or stolen the oxen;
and they told the truth, as was well known afterward; but the Lieutenant
was not satisfied, and ordered them seized and executed.

Four Apache chiefs were seized and tied. Cochise (in the Apache dialect
Wood) managed to get hold of a knife, which he had concealed, cut his
bonds, and escape. He was a very brave leader, and after having wreaked
a terrible vengeance for the treachery of American troops to the
Apaches, died in peace at the Indian Agency in the Chiricahua Mountains,
1874.

The war thus inaugurated by this Apache chieftain lasted fourteen years,
and has scarcely any parallel in the horrors of Indian warfare. The men,