Turning into the court of the house, they strolled through a medley of wagons, mules, horses, merchandise, muleteers, teamsters, idlers, white men and Indians.  Coronado soon picked out a couple of rancheros whom he knew as capital riders, fair marksmen, faithful and intelligent.  Next his eye fell upon a man in Mexican clothing, almost as dark and dirty too as the ordinary Mexican, but whose height, size, insolence of carriage, and ferocity of expression marked him as of another and more pugnacious, more imperial race.

“You are an American,” said Coronado, in his civil manner, for he had two manners as opposite as the poles.

“I be,” replied the stranger, staring at Coronado as a Lombard or Frankish warrior might have stared at an effeminate and diminutive Roman.

“May I ask what your name is?”

“Some folks call me Texas Smith.”

Coronado shifted uneasily on his feet, as a man might shift in presence of a tiger, who, as he feared, was insufficiently chained.  He was face to face with a fellow who was as much the terror of the table-land, from the borders of Texas to California, as if he had been an Apache chief.

This noted desperado, although not more than twenty-six or seven years old, had the horrible fame of a score of murders.  His appearance mated well with his frightful history and reputation.  His intensely black eyes, blacker even than the eyes of Coronado, had a stare of absolutely indescribable ferocity.  It was more ferocious than the merely brutal glare of a tiger; it was an intentional malignity, super-beastly and sub-human.  They were eyes which no other man ever looked into and afterward forgot.  His sunburnt, sallow, haggard, ghastly face, stained early and for life with the corpse-like coloring of malarious fevers, was a fit setting for such optics.  Although it was nearly oval in contour, and although the features were or had been fairly regular, yet it was so marked by hard, and one might almost say fleshless muscles, and so brutalized by long indulgence in savage passions, that it struck you as frightfully ugly.  A large dull-red scar on the right jaw and another across the left cheek added the final touches to this countenance of a cougar.

“He is my man,” whispered Garcia to Coronado.  “I have hired him for the great adventure.  Sixty piastres a month.  Why not take him with you to-day?”

Coronado gave another glance at the gladiator and meditated.  Should he trust this beast of a Texan to guard him against those other beasts, the Apaches?  Well, he could die but once; this whole affair was detestably risky; he must not lose time in shuddering over the first steps.

“Mr. Smith,” he said, “very glad to know that you are with us.  Can you start in an hour for the camp of Manga Colorada?  Sixty miles there.  We must be back by to-morrow night.  It would be best not to say where we are going.”

Texas Smith nodded, turned abruptly on the huge heels of his Mexican boots, stalked to where his horse was fastened, and began to saddle him.