Stránka:book 1922.djvu/567

Campfire Stories of Indian Qiaracter 537 cruelty and massacre, we have filled for ourselves a vial of wrath. It will certainly be outpoured on us to the last drop and the dregs. What the Persian did to rich and rotten Babylon, what the Goth did to rich and bloody Rome, another race will surely do to us. If ever the aroused and reinspired Yellow man comes forth in his hidden strength, in his reorganized millions, overpowering, slaving, burning, possessing, we can only bow our heads and say, "These are the instruments of God's wrath. We brought this on ourselves. All this we did to the Redman. The fate of Babylon and of bloody Rome is ours. We wrote our own doom as they did." THE APACHE INDIAN'S CASE (From "On the Border with Crook" by Captain John G. Bourke, U. S. A. Courtesy of Messrs Charles Scrib- ner's Sons.) For years I have collected the data and have contem- plated the project of writing the history of this people, based not only upon the accounts transmitted to us from the Spaniards and their descendants, the Mexicans, but upon the Apache's own story, as conserved in his myths, and traditions ; but I have lacked both the leisure and the inclination, to put the project into execution. It would require a man with the even-handed sense of justice pos- sessed by a Guizot, and the keen, critical, analytical powers of a Gibbon, to deal fairly with a question in which the ferocity of the savage Redman has been more than equaled by the ferocity of the Christian Caucasian; in which the occasional treachery of the aborigines has found its best excuse in the unvarying Punic faith of the Caucasian in- vader: in which promises on each side have been made.