Here another hurly-burly of rearing and plunging combat awaited him.  Coronado, charging as an old Castilian hidalgo might have charged upon the Moors, had plunged directly into the midst of the Apaches who awaited him, giving them little time to use their arrows, and at first receiving no damage.  The six rifles of his Mexicans sent two Apaches out of their saddles, and then came a capering, plunging joust of lances, both parties using the same weapon.  Coronado alone had sabre and revolver; and he handled them both with beautiful coolness and dexterity; he rode, too, as well as the best of all these other centaurs.  His superb horse whirled and reared under the guidance of a touch of the knees, while the rider plied firearm with one hand and sharply-ground blade with the other.  Thurstane, an infantryman, and only a fair equestrian, would not have been half so effective in this combat of caballeros.

Coronado’s first bullet knocked a villainous-looking tatterdemalion clean into the happy hunting grounds.  Then came a lance thrust; he parried it with his sabre and plunged within range of the point; there was a sharp, snake-like hiss of the light, curved blade; down went Apache number two.  At this rate, providing there were no interruptions, he could finish the whole twenty.  He went at his job with a handy adroitness which was almost scientific, it was so much like surgery, like dissection.  His mind was bent, with a sort of preternatural calmness and cleverness, upon the business of parrying lance thrusts, aiming his revolver, and delivering sabre cuts.  It was a species of fighting intellection, at once prudent and destructive.  It was not the headlong, reckless, pugnacious rage of the old Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian berserker.  It was the practical, ready, rational furor of the Latin race.

Presently he saw that two of his rancheros had been lanced, and that there were but four left.  A thrill of alarm, a commencement of panic, a desire to save himself at all hazards, crisped his heart and half paralyzed his energy.  Remembering with perfect distinctness that four of his barrels were empty, he would perhaps have tried to retreat at the risk of being speared in the back, had he not at this critical moment been joined by Texas Smith.

That instinctive, ferocious, and tireless fighter, while seeming to be merely circling and curveting among his assailants, contrived to recharge two barrels of his revolver, and was once more ready for business.  Down went one Apache; then the horse of another fell to reeling and crouching in a sickly way; then a charge of half a dozen broke to right and left in irresolute prancings.  At sight of this friendly work Coronado drew a fresh breath of courage, and executed his greatest feat yet of horsemanship and swordsmanship.  Spurring after and then past one of the wheeling braves, he swept his sabre across the fellow’s bare throat with a drawing stroke, and half detached the scowling, furious, frightened head from the body.