^4 Buffalo Hunt in Northern Mexico. 115 



excellence — you may not match him the world over as a rider, not 

 though you set against him the most peerless of the turbaned knights 

 of the jereed. Once it was my fortune to see a thousand rcuickeros, 

 in holiday garb and mounted, sweep down at a run to meet President 

 Juarez, then e?i route to begin his final campaign against the hapless 

 Hapsburger. They literally glistened with silver — silver on saddle 

 and bridle, silver on jacket and trowsers, silver on hats, silver on 

 heels ; and, as with vivas long and shrilly intoned, and stabs of rowel 

 merciless and maddening, they drove their mustangs — the choicest 

 of the wild herds — headlong forward, the spectacle was stirring 

 enough to have made the oldest hetman of the Cossacks young 

 again. No wonder Kleber never ceased admiration of the Mame- 

 lukes who charged his squares over the yellow sands under the Pyra- 

 mids. These, my companeros of the hunt, were not in holiday attire. 

 Their clothes were plain tan-colored leather, yet they rode like the 

 thousand, and when I looked in their faces there was no mistaking 

 the tribal relation. The rci7icheros of the desert of Durango are 

 lineally akin to the rancheros of Tamaulipas and their brothers of 

 Sonora. 



My friend and I were well mounted, — Don Miguel had dealt 

 fairly by us, — yet we could not ride like the Mexicans. Their system 

 is essentially different from ours ; whereas we use the rein for every 

 movement of the horse, — forward, right, left, backward, check, — 

 they will ride all day keeping it loose over the little finger ; a press- 

 ure of the knee, an inclination of the body, a wave of the bridle hand, 

 in extreme cases a plunge of the spur, are their resorts. A pull on 

 one of their bits, one pull such as our jockeys are accustomed to at 

 the end of a race, would drive the beasts mad, if it did not make fine 

 splinters of their jaws. 



In connection with the excellences of my comrades, it may be 

 well to add that their arms were of every variety, from a Sharpe's 

 repeater to an cscopeta, some of the latter being identical with the 

 bell-mouthed blunderbusses of good Queen Bess. I noticed one 

 which had on it a stamp of the Tower ; it was smit with a devouring 

 leprosy of rust, and looked as if Raleigh or one of the later bucca- 

 neers had taken it from the old arsenal and dropped it overboard, 

 as he sailed and sailed. Verily, I had rather been a buffalo fired at 

 with such a piece, than the hunter at the other end to do the firing. 



