erchandise, muleteers, teamsters, idlers, white
men and Indians. Coronado soon picked out a couple of rancheros whom he
knew as capital riders, fair marksmen, faithful and intelligent. Next his
eye fell upon a man in Mexican clothing, almost as dark and dirty too as
the ordinary Mexican, but whose height, size, insolence of carriage, and
ferocity of expression marked him as of another and more pugnacious, more
imperial race.

"You are an American," said Coronado, in his civil manner, for he had two
manners as opposite as the poles.

"I be," replied the stranger, staring at Coronado as a Lombard or Frankish
warrior might have stared at an effeminate and diminutive Roman.

"May I ask what your name is?"

"Some folks call me Texas Smith."

Coronado shifted uneasily on his feet, as a man might shift in presence of
a tiger, who, as he feared, was insufficiently chained. He was face to
face with a fellow who was as much the terror of the table-land, from the
borders of Texas to California, as if he had been an Apache chief.

This noted desperado, although not more than twenty-six or seven years
old, had the horrible fame of a score of murders. His appearance mated
well with his frightful history and reputation. His intensely black eyes,
blacker even than the eyes of Coronado, had a stare of absolutely
indescribable ferocity. It was more ferocious than the merely brutal glare
of a tiger; it was an intentional malignity, super-beastly and sub-human.
They were eyes which no other man ever looked into and afterward forgot.
His sunburnt, sallow, haggard, ghastly face, stained early and for life
with the corpse-like coloring of malarious fevers, was a fit setting for
such optics. Although it was nearly oval in contour, and although the
features were or had been fairly regular, yet it was so marked by hard,
and one might almost say fleshless muscles, and so brutalized by long
indulgence in savage passions, that it struck you as frightfully ugly. A
large dull-red scar on the right jaw and another across the left cheek
added the final touches to this countenance of a cougar.

"He is my man," whispered Garcia to Coronado. "I have hired him for the
great adventure. Sixty piastres a month. Why not take him with you
to-day?"

Coronado gave another glance at the gladiator and meditated. Should he
trust this beast of a Texan to guard him against those other beasts, the
Apaches? Well, he could die but once; this whole affair was dete