“My dear uncle, why didn’t you hire the devil?” whispered Coronado as he stared after the cutthroat.

“Get yourself ready, my nephew,” was Garcia’s reply.  “I will see to the men and horses.”

In an hour the expedition was off at full gallop.  Coronado had laid aside his American dandy raiment, and was in the full costume of a Mexican of the provinces—­broad-brimmed hat of white straw, blue broadcloth jacket adorned with numerous small silver buttons, velvet vest of similar splendor, blue trousers slashed from the knee downwards and gay with buttons, high, loose embroidered boots of crimson leather, long steel spurs jingling and shining.  The change became him; he seemed a larger and handsomer man for it; he looked the caballero and almost the hidalgo.

Three hours took the party thirty miles to a hacienda of Garcia’s, where they changed horses, leaving their first mounting for the return.  After half an hour for dinner, they pushed on again, always at a gallop, the hoofs clattering over the hard, yellow, sunbaked earth, or dashing recklessly along smooth sheets of rock, or through fields of loose, slippery stones.  Rare halts to breathe the animals; then the steady, tearing gallop again; no walking or other leisurely gait.  Coronado led the way and hastened the pace.  There was no tiring him; his thin, sinewy, sun-hardened frame could bear enormous fatigue; moreover, the saddle was so familiar to him that he almost reposed in it.  If he had needed physical support, he would have found it in his mental energy.  He was capable of that executive furor, that intense passion of exertion, which the man of Latin race can exhibit when he has once fairly set himself to an enterprise.  He was of the breed which in nobler days had produced Gonsalvo, Cortes, Pizarro, and Darien.

These riders had set out at ten o’clock in the morning; at five in the afternoon they drew bridle in sight of the Apache encampment.  They were on the brow of a stony hill:  a pile of bare, gray, glaring, treeless, herbless layers of rock; a pyramid truncated near its base, but still of majestic altitude; one of the pyramids of nature in that region; in short, a butte.  Below them lay a valley of six or eight miles in length by one or two in breadth, through the centre of which a rivulet had drawn a paradise of verdure.  In the middle of the valley, at the head of a bend in the rivulet, was a camp of human brutes.  It was a bivouac rather than a camp.  The large tents of bison hide used by the northern Indians are unknown to the Apaches; they have not the bison, and they have less need of shelter in winter.  What Coronado saw at this distance was, a few huts of branches, a strolling of many horses, and some scattered riders.

Texas Smith gave him a glance of inquiry which said, “Shall we go ahead—­or fire?”