The Essential Writings of James Willard Schultz. James Willard Schultz
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see how it is: I have to be here every minute of the day from sunrise to sunset. There’s no use talking about me exploring the cave,” I told Hannah.
“Nonsense!” she exclaimed. “You can go into it while I stand watch in here. But first, I want to see the hole: show me where it is.”
She was right. With her help I could have all the time that I wanted to go into it. But we had not brought up the rope and candles, and I did not like to leave the summit to go after them. I pointed the way to the cave. Down past a bend in the west slope, it was not in sight from the lookout, but I explained that she could find it by the half-circle of rock slabs piled below the entrance, and she hurried off down along the summit. I watched her until she turned from it and went out of sight, and, taking up the field-glasses, discovered a sudden upburst of smoke away south in the Blue Range. I sighted it with the chart level, went to the telephone and reported: ‘‘Fire on 182, away down in the Blue.”
A few minutes later, I heard Honeymoon Meadows and Saddle Mountain lookouts giving their degree sightings of the fire; and then the Supervisor ordering to it the patrols in that section of the forest.
I took the glasses again, and stared down into Black River Canyon and the little grass park in it. No smoke was there nor any living, moving thing. I turned to the north: smoke was curling up from the forest due west of the sawmill. Yes, and also from a point a mile or more farther west: the I.W.W. firebugs had begun their destructive work. I sighted the two fires and quickly reported them, and kept the receiver to my ear. Green’s Peak reported them; the Supervisor ordered his C. C. Ranch and Cienega Flat patrols to a fire at Sheep Springs, and another a mile west of the Springs. He then conferred with the patrols at the sawmill, started them to the fires, and then Mr. Hammond, the mill-owner, said that he would send his men with them, and himself and wife guard their property, How I hoped that the I.W.W. men would be found and killed before they could do further damage to our forest! It was bad enough to see the great trees burning from a fire started by lightning or by some careless traveler; but to see them destroyed— deliberately destroyed—by enemies of our country was unbearable. I took up my rifle and said to it: ‘‘ Partner, how I would like to empty you into those two Hun helpers down there! ”
I was very uneasy; too worried to search for more beads. I went outside and walked around and around the lookout, stared now and then at the Sheep Springs fires, saw that the smoke from them was increasing instead of diminishing in volume. Well, the patrols had not had time to arrive there and begin fighting them. It was going to be a big fight, for a strong west wind was blowing. Hannah now came in sight, up on top from the cave hole, and ran toward me, stopping now and then to wave her hands to me and point to the fires, until, at last, she was near enough to hear me shout: “Yes. I see them. I have reported them!”
She came up into the lookout, out of breath and almost crying: “Those awful I.W.W. men! They set those fires! ” she gasped.
“Sure they did! And will set more if the patrols don’t kill them,” I answered, and proceeded to tell her what was going on down there.
“I can’t understand how men can be so bad!” she exclaimed.
An hour passed. Two hours, and we saw that the smoke of the two fires was dying out. The patrols had them under control, would soon extinguish them. Anxiously we waited to listen in at the telephone, and learn if the two firebugs had been given what was due them.
We began talking of other things. Of the cave, of course. Hannah thought that it was a wonderful find I had made; that we might find some very wonderful things in it left there by the ancient people. A prospector who had once stopped a few days with us had told us about caves in Old Mexico in which had been found gold idols and dishes, along with pieces of beautiful pottery. Here, too, was pottery. Might we not also find gold with it in our cave? The very thought of it was exciting. We knew a little, a very little, about those old pottery-makers. Five miles down the Little Colorado from our home we had seen the tumbled-down rock walls of their ancient homes, with great quantities of broken pottery scattered about. There, too, could be traced the courses of their irrigating ditches; and upon the faces of some near-by rocks we had seen pictures that they had cut in. Pictures of men, animals, and of things which none of the settlers could understand. Some said that they were not Indians who had lived there, and evidently raised some kind of crops which they irrigated; that they must have been one of the lost tribes of Israel, gone long before the Indians came. Well, we talked and talked about all that we had heard, and wondered if any of it was true, and planned just how we would go down into my cave and explore it. And so the afternoon wore on, and at five o’clock I informed the Supervisor that I could see no more smoke from the Sheep Springs fires, nor any fresh fires starting.
‘‘Good. But you just stay where you are until nine o’clock. Remember, a whole lot depends upon you and Green’s Peak lookout. I don’t believe that the patrols have caught those firebugs, else they would have been ’phoning about it.”
He was right. Not fifteen minutes after he hung up, we heard one of the patrols telephoning him that they had the fires completely out, but had been unable to find the men who had set them. We learned, too, that there was to be an all-night guarding of the mill, and that the deputy sheriff had started with a posse of men from Springerville in search of the two fire-setters.
We had brought up but a light lunch at noon and were now very hungry. But that should n’t happen again, we said. In the morning we would bring up a sackful of provisions and dishes and frying-pan, so that we could cook meals upon the lookout stove whenever we wanted to.
The evening wore on, and at seven-thirty, by my time, there was the most beautiful sunset that we had ever seen. Then the darkness began to come up out of the deep canyons under us, and up and up the steep slopes of our mountain until, at about eight-twenty, we were in darkness in the lookout. Said Hannah then, with a little shiver: ‘‘I don’t fancy going down to the cabin in this awful dark. With old Double Killer wandering about, and maybe worse than he, it will be no fun stumbling down the trail.”
Neither did I fancy it, but I would n’t say so: “Pooh! We shall be safe enough going down; we shall just have to be careful not to stumble on the rocks and get a bad fall,” I told her, and stood up. And at once I saw the bright red glow of a small fire down in the Black River Canyon! Right where I had twice thought that there was smoke! “Oh!” I gasped.
“What?” Hannah cried, springing from the chair.
“The ham-stealer! Look down into the canyon! See the fire!’’
She looked, and gave a little squeal of fright.
“What shall we do?” she presently whispered.
I had been watching the fire; now and then it became suddenly obscured; by some one passing in front of it, of course. “ It is a cooking fire, no doubt about that!” I said. “And whoever is down there has known my hours of duty as well as I do, and has never had a fire going when I have been up here. But on two mornings I have imagined that I saw a faint haze down there. Now I know that it really was smoke.”
“Who can he be? And why hiding down there?” Hannah wondered.
“Maybe they, instead of he. Maybe a lot of white law-breakers or renegade Apaches in hiding down there. I’m going to report it,” I said, and rang the office, in Springerville, rang and rang, and got no answer. Then I tried to get Green’s Peak; the sawmill; C. C. Ranch; the Indian Agency. None of them answered my call, and I knew that something had gone wrong with the telephone line. The firebugs, or other bad men infesting the forest, had probably cut it. Of course the telephone line men would be out to repair it as soon as possible, but in the meantime so many fires might be started that they never could be got under control.
Said Hannah: ‘‘This is terrible. I am not going down to that cabin, not if I starve! I would not sleep down there for all the mines of Arizona!”
‘‘We just have to go to it, and I believe that we shall be safe enough. But we shall come right back, with our bedding. Then we’ll bring up the food, all of it, if we have to make four trips with it, and we ’ll make the lookout our little fort until