I never did learn to speak Apache properly. Mind you, it ain’t easy, mainly because the red brutes seldom stand still long enough – and if you’ve any sense, you don’t either, or you’re liable to find yourself studying their system of vowel pronunciation (which is unique, by the way) while hanging head-down over a slow fire or riding for dear life across the Jornada del Muerto with them howling at your heels and trying to stick lances in your liver. Both of which predicaments I’ve experienced in my time, and you may keep ’em.

      Still, it’s odd that I never got my tongue round it, for apart from fleeing and fornication, slinging the bat^fn1 is my strongest suit; well, I speak nine languages better than the natives, and can rub along in another dozen or so. And I knew the ’Paches well enough. God help me; I was even married to one for a spell, banns, beads, buffalo-dance and all, and a spanking little wild beast she was, too, with her peach-brown satin skin and hot black eyes, and those white doeskin leggings up to her thighs with the tiny silver bells all down the sides … I can close my eyes and hear them tinkling yet, sixty years after, and feel the pine-needles under my knees, and smell the woodsmoke mingling with the musky perfume of her hair and the scent of the wild flowers outside her bower … the soft lips teasing my ear, murmuring ‘Make my bells ring again, pinda-lickoyee^fn2 …’ Aye, me, it’s a long time ago. But that’s the way to learn a language, if you like, in between the sighs and squeals, and if it didn’t happen in this case the reason is that my buxom savage was not only a great chief’s daughter but Mexican hidalga on her mother’s side, and inclined to put on airs something peculiar, such as speaking only Spanish in preference to the tribal dialect of the common herd. They can be just as pert and hoity-toity in a Mimbreno wickiup as they can in a Belgravia drawing-room, believe me. Fortunately, there’s a cure. But that’s beside the point for the moment. Even if my Apache never progressed far beyond ‘Nuetsche-shee, eetzan’, which may be loosely translated as ‘Come here, girl’, and is all you need to know (apart from a few fawning protestations of friendship and whines for mercy, and much good they’ll do you), I still recognise the diabolical lingo when I hear it. That guttural, hissing mumble, with all its ‘Tz’ and ‘zl’ and ‘rr’ noises, like a drunk Scotch-Jew having trouble with his false teeth, is something you don’t forget in a hurry. So when I heard it in the Travellers’ a few weeks ago, and had mastered an instinctive impulse to dive for the door bawling ‘’Pash! Ride for it, you fellows, and save your hair!’, I took stock, and saw that it was coming in a great spate from a pasty-looking specimen with a lordly academic voice and some three-ha’penny order on his shirt front, who was enthralling a group of toadies in a corner of the smoking-room. I demanded to know what the devil he meant by it, and he turned out to be some distinguished anthropologist or other who had been lecturing to the Royal Geographic on North American Indians.

      ‘And what d’you know about them, apart from that beastly chatter?’ says I, pretty warm, for he had given me quite a start, and I could see at a glance that he was one of these snoopopathic meddlers who strut about with a fly-whisk and notebook, prodding lies out of the niggers and over-tipping the dragoman on college funds. He looked taken aback, until they told him who I was, and that I had a fair acquaintance with North American Indians myself, to say nothing of other various aborigines; at that he gave me a distant flabby hand, and condescended to ask me an uneasy question or two about my American travels. I told him I’d been out with Terry and Custer in ’76 – and that was as far as I got before he said: ‘Oh, indeed?’ down his nose, damned chilly, showed me his shoulder, and began the most infernal prose you ever heard to the rest of the company, all about the Yankees’ barbarous treatment of the Plains tribes after the Uprising, and their iniquitous Indian policy in general, the abominations of the reservation system, and the cruelties practised in the name of civilisation on helpless nomads who desired only to be left alone to pursue their traditional way of life as peaceful herdsmen, fostering their simple culture, honouring their ancient gods, and generally prancing about like fauns in Arcady. Mercifully, I hadn’t had dinner.

      ‘Noble savages, eh?’ says I, when he’d paused for breath, and he gave me a look full of sentimental spite.

      ‘I might call them that,’ snaps he. ‘Do I take it that you would disagree?’

      ‘Depends which ones you’re talking about,’ says I. ‘Now, Spotted Tail was a gentleman. Chico Velasquez, on the other hand, was an evil vicious brute. But you probably never met either of ’em. Care for a brandy, then?’

      He went pink. ‘I thank you, no. By gentleman, I suppose,’ he went on, bristling, ‘you mean one who has despaired to the point of submission, while brute would no doubt describe any sturdy independent patriot who resisted the injustice of an alien rule, or revolted against broken treaties—’

      ‘If sturdy independence consists of cutting off women’s fingers and fringing your buckskins with them, then Chico was a patriot, no error,’ says I. ‘Mind you, that was the soft end of his behaviour. Hey, waiter, another one, and keep your thumb out of it, d’ye hear?’

      My new acquaintance was going still pinker, and taking in breath; he wasn’t used to the argumentum ad Chico Velasquez, and it was plainly getting his goat, as I intended it should.

      ‘Barbarism is to be expected from a barbarian – especially when he has been provoked beyond endurance!’ He snorted and sneered. ‘Really, sir – will you seriously compare errant brutality committed by this … this Velasquez, as you call him – who by his name I take it sprang from that unhappy Pueblo stock who had been brutalised by centuries of Spanish atrocity – will you compare it, I say, with a calculated policy of suppression – nay, extermination – devised by a modern, Christian government? You talk of an Indian’s savagery? Yet you boast acquaintance with General Custer, and doubtless you have heard of Chivington? Sand Creek, sir! Wounded Knee! Washita! Ah, you see,’ cries he in triumph, ‘I can quote your own lexicon to you! In face of that, will you dare condone Washington’s treatment of the American Indian?’

      ‘I don’t condone it,’ says I, holding my temper. ‘And I don’t condemn it, either. It happened, just as the tide comes in, and since I saw it happen, I know better than to jump to the damnfool sentimental conclusions that are fashionable in college cloisters, let me tell you—’

      There were cries of protest, and my anthropologist began to gobble. ‘Fashionable indeed! Have you read Mrs Jackson,¹ sir? Are you ignorant of the miserable condition to which a proud and worthy people have been reduced? Since you served in the Sioux campaign, you cannot be unaware of the callous and vindictive zeal with which it and subsequent expeditions were conducted! Against a resistless foe! Can you defend the extirpation of the Modocs, or the Apaches, or a dozen others I could mention? For shame, sir!’ He was getting the bit between his teeth now, and I was warming just a trifle myself. ‘And all this at a time when the resources of a vast modern state might have been employed in a policy of humanity, restraint, and enlightenment! But no – all the dark old prejudices and hatreds must be given full and fearful