Three hours took the party thirty miles to a hacienda of Garcia's, where
they changed horses, leaving their first mounting for the return. After
half an hour for dinner, they pushed on again, always at a gallop, the
hoofs clattering over the hard, yellow, sunbaked earth, or dashing
recklessly along smooth sheets of rock, or through fields of loose,
slippery stones. Rare halts to breathe the animals; then the steady,
tearing gallop again; no walking or other leisurely gait. Coronado led the
way and hastened the pace. There was no tiring him; his thin, sinewy,
sun-hardened frame could bear enormous fatigue; moreover, the saddle was
so familiar to him that he almost reposed in it. If he had needed physical
support, he would have found it in his mental energy. He was capable of
that executive furor, that intense passion of exertion, which the man of
Latin race can exhibit when he has once fairly set himself to an
enterprise. He was of the breed which in nobler days had produced
Gonsalvo, Cortes, Pizarro, and Darien.

These riders had set out at ten o'clock in the morning; at five in the
afternoon they drew bridle in sight of the Apache encampment. They were on
the brow of a stony hill: a pile of bare, gray, glaring, treeless,
herbless layers of rock; a pyramid truncated near its base, but still of
majestic altitude; one of the pyramids of nature in that region; in short,
a butte. Below them lay a valley of six or eight miles in length by one or
two in breadth, through the centre of which a rivulet had drawn a paradise
of verdure. In the middle of the valley, at the head of a bend in the
rivulet, was a camp of human brutes. It was a bivouac rather than a camp.
The large tents of bison hide used by the northern Indians are unknown to
the Apaches; they have not the bison, and they have less need of shelter
in winter. What Coronado saw at this distance was, a few huts of branches,
a strolling of many horses, and some scattered riders.