wrist, a stone-headed beetle, grooved and bound fast with rawhide to a long, slender, hard-wood handle, which in turn was sheathed in a heavy rawhide covering, shrunk into a steel-like re-enforcement.  Armed alike, naked alike, savage alike, and purely animal in the blind desire of battle, the two were at issue before a hand could stay them.  All chance of delay or separation was gone.  Both white and red men fell back and made arena for a unique and awful combat.

There was a moment of measuring, that grim advance balance struck when two strong men meet for a struggle which for either may end alone in death.  The Indian was magnificent in mien, superb in confidence.  Fear was not in him.  His vast figure, nourished on sweet meat of the plains, fed by pure air and developed by continual exercise, showed like the torso of a minor Hercules, powerful but not sluggish in its power.  His broad and deep chest, here and there spotted with white scars, arched widely for the vital organs, but showed no clogging fat.  His legs were corded and thin.  His arms were also slender, but showing full of easy-playing muscles with power of rapid and unhampered strength.  Two or three inches above the six-feet mark he stood as he cast off his war bonnet and swept back a hand over the standing eagle plumes, whipped fast to his braided hair.  White Calf was himself a giant.

Yet huge and menacing as he stood, the figure opposed to him was still more formidable.  Juan, the mozo overtopped him by nearly half a head, and was as broad or broader in the shoulder.  His body, a dull brown in colour, showed smoother than that of his enemy, the muscles not having been brought out by unremitted exercise.  Yet under that bulk of flesh there lay no man might tell how much of awful vigour.  The loop of the war club would not slip over his great hand.  He caught it in his fingers and made the weapon hum about his head, as some forgotten ancestor of his, tall Navajo, or forgotten cave dweller, may have done before the Spaniard came.  The weapon seemed to him like a toy, and he cast his eye about for another more commensurate with his strength, but, seeing none, forgot the want, and in the sheer ignorance of fear which made his bravery, began the fight as though altogether careless of its end.

White Calf was before his people, whose chief he was by reason of his personal prowess, and with all the vanity of his kind he exulted in this opportunity of displaying his fitness for his place.  Yet in him natural bravery had a qualifying caution, which was here obviously well justified.  The Mexican made direct assault, rushing on with battle axe poised as though to end it all with one immediate blow.  With guard and parry he was more careless than the wild bull of the Plains, which meets his foe in direct impetuous assault.  White Calf was not so rash.  He stepped quickly back from the attack, and as the mozo plunged forward from the impulse of his