6              GOLD MINES OF THE PECOS AND THE GILA.'
Texas, and wonderful indeed were the narrations which he had to give concerning its Mexican rancheros, traders, and robbers ; concerning its fierce wild tribes of lance-bearing Indians on their swift horses, their long black hair, streaming to the winds, bedizened with circlets and bunches of dyed feathers ; its innumerable buffalo and wild horses, in great herds, pouring over flowery plains like dark, thundering rivers over-. flown ; its ferocious beasts—the bear, the puma, cougar, hyena, and leopard cat; and of his few countrymen, its more ferocious settlers, in their first deadly collisions with the bloody cowardice of the base soldiery of Mexico.
Though he was ignorant and rude, yet he had seen everything vividly; and with a graphic skill that was entirely unconscious, but which I have often noticed to be possessed by such men of rude, adventurous lives, he always seized upon the salient points of his picture, and gave you, perhaps in two words, or at most in a sentence, those features which define it to you at once—show it to be unlike anything else. Thus, though his lips were stiff, his enunciation slow, his language mean, studded with horrid blasphemies and a mongrel slang, part Mexi-can, American, and Indian, yet somehow he managed to give me a strikingly real description of everything concerning which he spoke; though this may have been owing, in a great measure, to the eager and pertinacious curiosity with which I followed up his least suggestive word with close questioning, until I had drawn out from him, to the satisfaction of my own mind, all that was necessary to the full elimination of the object or scene.
Thus, though his mind was void of fancy to the bleakness of a " Cimmerian waste," yet I obtained from him a warm and glowing picture of the tropical productiveness of this new land; of its rich and-yellow fruits; of its vast flower-robed prairies; of its mighty forest tangles, draped with long, grey, drooping moss, matted and wreathed with long vines that hung their snakelike garlands in fierce colored clusters of poisonous bloom " i' the sick air ;" of its cotton " tree" with huge boles ; of its marvellous productiveness in all grains; and last, its untold and unimaginable wealth in the precious metals and stones; its gold and silver mines, far to the north and west, among the mountains, to reach