468 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
through a glass, has presented rather, the grace and playful 
action of their lives, than this fierce scene. 
The colors of the mustang are surpassingly rich and 
beautiful. They are all intense and decided. You will 
find them white as the driven snow, without a dark hair on 
their bodies; and again, black as the concentrated essence 
of midnight—the sunbeams 
“« Smoothing the ebon down of darkness till it smiled,” 
at every movement of their buoyant humors; then a deep 
blood bay, with black mane and tail, or a rich red sorrel. 
Again, you find these dark colors mottled in clear relief 
upon the pure white. The effect is sometimes exquisite 
beyond description. I have seen them “spotted like a 
Pard,’”’ and marked in elegant rosettes like the skin of the 
African panther. The startling contrast of these deep colors, 
in graceful lines, banded and star’d, flecked and dotted, upon 
the snowy ground, is above the “Ken of Fancie,” beautiful. 
The Comanches—Nomadic tribes, who from their mountain 
fastness descend upon the plains below for plunder—like 
birds of prey stooping from their eyries, are mounted upon 
the finest specimens of these horses that are to be found, 
and with such rapidity do they move, that they will traverse 
hundreds of miles, carrying death and fear with them along 
a whole frontier, and yet retreat to their rocky holds in 
safety before the inhabitants can organize a pursuit. 
The warriors have a great passion for these “‘ paint horses” 
as they are called, and if I live to the age of Methuselah, f 
shall never forget the picturesque appearance of a party of 
twenty of them we pursued once for fifteen miles, all of 
whom were mounted upon fancifully mottled horses. Over 
the prairie and through the deep woods we scurried in that 
wild desperate chase—the dark gaunt savage forms on their 
snowy and freckled steeds, now and then to be seen ahead 
