CHAPTER V. ON THE RIO GRANDE.  AN ABSTRACT OF THE AUTHOR’S GENEALOGY OF MATERNAL LINEAGE

In the month of September I came to the end of my journey, as I arrived on the Rio Abajo.  Now I began the second chapter of my life’s voyage.  No longer a precocious child, I was growing to young manhood and was not lacking in those qualities which are essential in the successful performance of life’s continual struggle.  I was heartily welcomed by my uncle, my mother’s brother.  My aunt, poor lady, had, of course, given me up as lost and greeted me with joyful admiration.  But she did not venture close to me, for in me she saw a strong, lusty young man, bright eyed, alert-looking and carrying a deadly army revolver and wicked hunting knife at his belt.  To be sure, I was suntanned and graybacked beyond comparison with the dust of a thousand miles of wagon road.

As I had expected, I found my uncle in very prosperous circumstances, in a commercial sense.  And no wonder, for he was a tall, fine-looking man, under forty and overflowing with energy and personal magnetism.  And my mother’s little family tree did the rest—­aye, surely, it was not to be sneezed at, as will be presently seen.

Of course, mother traced her ancestral lineage, as all other people do, to Adam and Eve in general, but in particular she claimed descent from those ancient heroes of the Northland, the Vikings.  These daring rovers of the seas were really a right jolly set of men.  In their small galleys they roamed the trackless seas, undaunted alike by the terrors of the hurricane as by the perils of unknown shores.  On whatever coast they chanced—­finding it inhabited, they landed, fought off the men and captured their women.  They sacked villages and plundered towns, and loading their ships with booty, they set sail joyfully, homeward bound for the shores of the misty North Sea, the shallow German Ocean.  Here they had a number of retreats and strongholds.  There was Helgoland, the mysterious island; Cuxhaven, at the mouth of the river Elbe; Buxtehude, notoriously known from a very peculiar ferocious breed of dogs; Norse Loch on the coast of Holstein, and numerous other locker, or inlets, hard to find, harder to enter when found and hardest to pronounce.  In the course of time these rovers were visited by saintly Christian missionaries and, like all other Saxon tribes, they accepted the light of the Christian Gospel.  They saw the error of their way and eschewed their vocation of piracy and devoted their energies to commerce and the spreading of the Gospel of Christ.