In Arizona 
VIII.—Yaqui Visitors—Pedro’s Joke—Waiting to 
be Ambushed by Robbers—Searching 
for a Lost Mine 
By J. W. SCHULTZ 
Author of "My Life as an Indian,” "Life Among the Blackfeet,” “Floating Down the Missouri,” etc. 
W HEN we awoke this morning and got 
outside we saw with some surprise a 
couple of persons sleeping under a 
near mesquite tree. That is, we saw the out¬ 
lines of their forms, for they were covered with 
a bizarre blanket, which a glance was sufficient 
to identify as from the looms of the Tarahu- 
mares, a mountain tribe of Mexico. 
The rattling of our pots and pans awakened 
them, and they arose, a fine, well-built couple 
of rather young Indians, the woman especially. 
She had a really handsome face and beautiful, 
expressive eyes. They came over to the shack 
and entered into conversation with Sonora, who 
soon told me that they were Yaquis. I looked 
at them then with all the more interest, having 
heard so much of this blood-thirsty tribe. Their 
appearance belied the tales, however, for they 
seemed to be singularly gentle, quiet people, 
although not at all servile in their manner to¬ 
ward us. They thanked Sonora very prettily 
in Spanish for the generous breakfast he set 
before them, and after smoking a couple of 
cigarettes, they picked up their blankets and 
little sack of personal effects, and disappeared 
in the brush toward the river. I noticed that 
both wore heavy rawhide sandals, held in place 
by a loop over the big toe, and a thong over 
the instep. 
“They’re just up from Mexico,” Sonora told 
me, “an’ the man is goin’ to get a job on the 
railroad grade. Course he’ll get it; they’re 
good workers—these Yaquis—an’ he’ll work 
steady for three or four months, savin’ every 
cent possible, an’ then he’ll buy a repeating 
rifle, a couple of ’em, maybe, an’ lots of ammu¬ 
nition, an’ then he an’ his woman will fade 
out of sight. We won’t see ’em when they go 
south, neither will the revenue officers at the 
line, nor yet the Mexican rurales. Travelin’ 
nights, they’ll pass down through the Arizona 
and the Mexican deserts, an’ one fine day camp 
with their own people again in the wilds of the 
Sierra Madres. Say the man gets there with 
two rifles; he can get three hundred for ’em if 
he wants to sell, an’ for the five hundred 
cartridges he probably takes in fifty dollars 
more, which is a good clean up for his sum¬ 
mer’s work. But no matter who has ’em, there’s 
two more weapons in the tribe, to be used 
against the Mexican soldiers, an’ in murderin’ 
miners an’ prospectors. Why, maybe this very 
fellow will pot me one of these days.” 
“If that is what you think, why did you feed 
him, and send him away with a present of 
tobacco?” said I. 
“Well, you can’t see anyone go hungry,” he 
replied. “An’ again, I’ve laid the way for him 
to do me a good turn some day. That’s my 
motter in life; do all the favors you can, so 
long as you don’t rob yourself.” 
“Quite a different Hew of life from your 
friend Pedro,” I hazarded. 
“Oh, him! You’re wrong. Pedro was that 
liberal he’d deprive himself to do a favor. The 
enemies he made was through his own fool 
fault of playin’ jokes when an’ where he 
shouldn’t. But he couldn’t help it. _ Oh! you 
want to hear about the rest of that trip, do 
you?” 
I replied that I did, most decidedly. 
“All right, you can have it,” Sonora agreed. 
“It’s too hot to wash the dishes, so we’ll let 
’em go ’till night an’ put in the day out here in 
the remada.” 
Whereupon he rolled a fresh cigarette, 
stretched out on the cool, hard-packed earth 
floor, and began: 
“Well, arrivin’ at the little settlement of 
Casa Grande, the which is about a mile north 
of the ruins, we looked around for a place to 
camp, but before we could decide where to un¬ 
pack, Pedro struck up an acquaintance with a 
Senor Fernandez Enrico del Valle, who gave 
us an apartment to live in. You would think 
by his name that he lived in a regular mansion, 
but he didn’t. He had a four-room adobe shack 
an’ gave us the south end one of the string. 
Barrin’ the fleas, it was all right, an’ with a 
rain-proof roof an’ a fire-place, sure comfort¬ 
able. It didn’t take us long to stow our plunder 
in it, hire a boy for two bits a day to herd our 
burros, an’ there we was, sure fixed. 
“Senor Fernandez Enrico del Valle’s family 
wan’t large; only himself, his wife, an’ his 
sister, Senorita Cipriana del Valle. When I 
heard of her, I sure felt leary, knowin’ Pedro’s 
failin’ so well, but when I got to see her, my 
mind was easy; she was all of thirty-five, about 
four feet six high, an’ so fat that she was more 
like a giant pum’kin in shape than she was a 
human bein’! Her voice, though, was sur¬ 
prisin’ soft an’ girlish, an’ she was a talker from 
wayback. She made a dead set at Pedro on 
sight, an’ he flyin’ the track, she tried me, then 
Irish, an’ finally No Talk. He couldn’t talk 
Spanish at all, but he’d set an’ listen to her by 
the hour out in the remada, bobbin’ his head 
every minute or so an’ sayin’, ‘Si,’ which even 
that was a heap of talk for him to get off. 
“What had been worryin’ me was how we 
were goin’ to keep in grub durin’ this lay off, 
but it wasn’t more than two or three days be¬ 
fore I found a way. There were lots of ante¬ 
lope on the desert about the town, but much 
as they liked meat the Mexicans wasn’t hunting 
’em to speak of, which I puts down to their 
natural shiftlessness. For a starter I went out 
an’ killed one, an’ when I let it be known that 
I would sell meat, the carcass didn’t last fifteen 
minutes. That settled it; we went out every 
day, by turns, an’ in no great time had sacks 
full of beans, corn, chili an’ other truck of the 
country an’ a nice sackful of Mexican silver to 
boot, enough to buy supplies for a six months’ 
trip. 
“In goin’ an’ cornin’ on these huntin’ trips we 
often passed the big ruins, an’ quite often I 
would stop an’ prowl around ’em a bit. There’s 
somethin’ about these ruins of the Southwest an’ 
Old Mexico that kind of draws you to ’em an’ 
you can’t get away from it. You want to know 
all about ’em, an’ you can’t, an’ that makes you 
peevish. Take this ruin, for instance. It is a 
lot bigger than the Arizona Casa Grande ruin 
here. Why, some of the walls, made of big 
adobes of cement, are over five feet thick, an’ 
they were four stories high. The town, or pue¬ 
blo, must have had six or eight thousand people 
—industrious, hard workin’ people, an’ prosper¬ 
ous, too. Their ditches—you can see 'em plain 
to this day—irrigated thousands of acres of land 
thereabouts. They wore fine cloth. They made 
pottery of the finest, smoothest kind, an’ did 
some work in colors on the outside, an’ inside 
of it, too, that’ll rank with anything our white 
painters can do. They carved life-like things 
in stone. One axe I found had a bear’s head 
hammer end on it that was just the shape of 
a grizzly’s head. 
“Five or six miles south an’ west of the ruins, 
on top of a butte overlookin’ the big plain, is 
an old fort where the tribe, no doubt, kept 
watchers to spy out the approach of any enemy. 
Well, did the enemy come at last, an’ wipe these 
people off the earth? If not, what did happen 
to ’em? Where did they go? Who were they, 
anyhow? Sometimes I can’t help thinkin’ that 
