This was too much for a knight of prowess tamely to endure, and the boy blustered around in his most vigorous impersonation of the character of Broncho Bob.

“This ranch ain’t big enough to hold Holy John and me too.  Him or me, one or the other, has sure got to ask for his time, and it won’t be me either, you hear me shout.  I ’ll get him sure buffaloed, and if he don’t pull his freight before he ’s a day older, there ’ll be the biggest killing here that Apache Teju ever heard of.”

It was very quiet the next day at the ranch.  Mr. and Mrs. Williams and Madge had driven to Silver City, the cowboys were all on the range, and I kept in my room with some work.  After a time I heard a noise at the end of the house, just outside my room, and I went to see what it was.  Kid was there with a pick and shovel, toilsomely digging a hole in the hard adobe soil.

“What are you doing, Kid?”

“Nothing much.  Just digging a hole.”

“Isn’t that where the old Apache chief is buried?”

He looked up with interest.  “Is this the place?  Do you know right where it is?”

“They told me it is there where you are digging.  Those rocks that you can barely see, outline his grave.  Are you going to dig him up?”

“Me?  What would I want to dig him up for?  I ain’t lost no Injun!  I ’m just digging a hole—­for Madge.  She wants to plant a tree.  What did they bury him here for?  Did they kill him here on the ranch?”

“This was a fort once, before there was any ranch here, and there was a war with the Apaches, and they were getting beaten, and so they sent this old chief down to the fort to make terms for them.  The commander received him and put him in a tent and set a guard over him.  In the night the guard fell asleep, and when he wakened he was frightened lest the Indian might have escaped.  So he punched into the tent with his bayonet to see if he was still there, and hit the chief in the foot.  That made him angry and he came out and killed the guard.  The noise roused the soldiers, and they killed the chief, and they buried him here, inside the stockade, so that the Indians would n’t suspect that he was dead until they could get reinforcements.”

“The Injun killed the guard, did he?  Good enough for him!  I wish it had been Holy John!”

He fell to work again with more vigor than ever, but presently he stopped and growled: 

“I ’d like to run a blaze on that ornery galoot that he ’d remember all the rest of his life!”

After a while I chanced to see Kid carrying a bundle done up in a gunny sack down to the acequia and hide it among the currant bushes.  I noticed that he had carefully filled up the hole he had been digging, and I asked,

“Aren’t you going to plant the tree?”

“No,” he replied carelessly, “it would n’t grow there.  The soil’s too hard.”

The cowboys spread their beds every night under the cottonwoods beside the lower acequia, and that night we heard them in earnest discussion long after they had gone to bed.  Mr. Williams was with them for a short time and came back, saying that they were talking about ghosts, and that Kid had declared emphatically that the old Apache chief walked o’ nights and that he had both seen and heard him.