234 LIFE IN THE FAR WEST 



and leather through their towns they, as is but 

 natural, gladly accept husbands from the latter class : 

 preferring the stranger, who possesses the heart and 

 strong right arm to defend them, to the miserable 

 cowardly " pelados," who hold what little they have on 

 sufferance of savage Indians, but one degree superior 

 to themselves. 



Certainly no band of hunters that ever appeared in 

 the vale of Taos, numbered in its ranks a properer lot of 

 lads than those now camped on Greenhorn, intent on 

 matrimonial foray into the settlements of New Mexico. 

 There was young Dick Wooton, who was " some " for 

 his inches, being six feet six, and as straight and strong 

 as the barrel of his long rifle. Shoulder to shoulder 

 with this " boy," stood Rube Herring, and not a hair's- 

 breadth difference in height or size was there between 

 them. Killbuck, though mountain winters had sprinkled 

 a few snow-flakes on his head, looked up to neither ; and 

 La Bonte held his own with any mountaineer who ever 

 set a trap in sight of Long's Peak or the Snowy Range. 

 Marcellin who, though a Mexican, despised his people 

 and abjured his blood, having been all his life in the 

 mountains with the white hunters looked down easily 

 upon six feet and odd inches. In form a Hercules, he had 

 the symmetry of an Apollo ; with strikingly handsome 

 features, and masses of long black hair hanging from 

 his slouching beaver over the shoulders of his buckskin 

 hunting shirt. He, as he was wont to say, was " no 

 dam Spaniard, but 'mountainee man,' wagh !" Cha- 

 bonard, a half-breed, was not lost in the crowd ; and, 



