SOPORI RANCHE, 101 
| 
y weeks, they began to “hope that the Indians had not got 
: them.” 
| The girls chatted away with that perfect ease which 
. strikes a stranger so much, even in the humblest of the 
| people, provided they are Americans bred and born. This 
Jemigrant family got on very well at first, their flocks and 
J herds multiplied, and the well-watered strip of land around 
killed two of their brothers, and frightened their mother to 
/ death when their last little boy was born. ‘“ But,” said the 
youngest girl, ‘they haven’t been here now for two years, So 
/ we are expecting them every month,” This girl then told 
me of her experience in Indian warfare. 
About the time of the last visit from the Apaches, she and 
fa little Mexican girl were on their way to meet their fathers 
at the mines up in the mountains, accompanied by some 
peons, when they suddenly fell into an ambuscade. The 
Mexican peons fled for their lives, leaving the two girls in 
ythe hands of the Apaches, who placed them on ponies and 
carried them off across the mountains. At first they were 
cindly treated ; but in the meantime the peons had given the 
larm, and the father, with all the miners working with him, 
When the Apaches found themselves 
tard pressed, they stripped the girl (who was then fifteen 
yYears old) of everything, even her shoes, knocked her 
enseless with a blow on the head from a tomahawk, speared 
ler in several places, and, after shooting some arrows into 
ter, left her for dead. She rolled off the footpath down the 
dank, and was thus hidden from sight when her father and 
is party passed by, but a few feet from her. As far as she 
‘could make out, it was forty-eight hours before she recovered 
Started off in pursuit. 
i 
