It is only a workaday matter, all this; but workaday stuff does the
business nowadays.




MASSAI'S CROOKED TRAIL


IT is a bold person who will dare to say that a wilder savage ever lived
than an Apache Indian, and in this respect no Apache can rival Massai.

He was a _bronco_ Chiricahua whose _tequa_ tracks were so long and
devious that all of them can never be accounted for. Three regiments of
cavalry, all the scouts--both white and black--and Mexicans galore had
their hack, but the ghostly presence appeared and disappeared from the
Colorado to the Yaqui. No one can tell how Massai's face looks, or
looked, though hundreds know the shape of his footprint.

The Seventh made some little killings, but they fear that Massai was not
among the game. There surely is or was such a person as Massai. He
developed himself slowly, as I will show by the Sherlock Holmes methods
of the chief of scouts, though even he only got so far, after all.
Massai manifested himself like the dust-storm or the morning mist--a
shiver in the air, and gone.

The chief walked his horse slowly back on the lost trail in disgust,
while the scouts bobbed along behind perplexed. It was always so. Time
has passed, and Massai, indeed, seems gone, since he appears no more.