LIFE IN THE FAR WEST. 169 



the distant wilderness. Utterly despising their own coun- 

 trymen, whom they are used to contrast with the dashing 

 white hunters who swagger in all the pride of fringe 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 matri- 

 monial 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'^ 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 ! " Chabonard, a half-breed, was not lost in the 

 crowd ; and, the last in height, but the first in every 

 quality which constitutes excellence in a mountaineer, 

 whether of indomitable courage or perfect indifference to 

 death or danger with an iron frame capable of withstand- 

 ing hunger, thirst, heat, cold, fatigue, and hardships of 

 every kind of wonderful presence of mind and endlees 

 resources in times of peril with the instinct of an animal 

 and the moral courage of a man, who was "taller" for his 



