their curiosity; and their little wiry horses were now caracoling,
rearing, and plunging in close proximity to the two speakers.

"We will talk of this by ourselves," said Coronado. "Let us go to your
camp."

The conjoint movement of the leaders toward the Indian bivouac was a
signal for their followers to mingle and exchange greetings. The
adventurers were enveloped and very nearly ridden down by over two hundred
prancing, screaming horsemen, shouting to their visitors in their own
guttural tongue or in broken Spanish, and enforcing their wild speech with
vehement gestures. It was a pandemonium which horribly frightened the
Mexican rancheros, and made Coronado's dark cheek turn to an ashy yellow.

The civilized imagination can hardly conceive such a tableau of savagery
as that presented by these Arabs of the great American desert. Arabs! The
similitude is a calumny on the descendants of Ishmael; the fiercest
Bedouin are refined and mild compared with the Apaches. Even the brutal
and criminal classes of civilization, the pugilists, roughs, burglars, and
pickpockets of our large cities, the men whose daily life is rebellion
against conscience, commandment, and justice, offer a gentler and nobler
type of character and expression than these "children of nature." There
was hardly a face among that gang of wild riders which did not outdo the
face of Texas Smith in degraded ferocity. Almost every man and boy was
obviously a liar, a thief, and a murderer. The air of beastly cruelty was
made even more hateful by an air of beastly cunning. Taking color,
brutality, grotesqueness, and filth together, it seemed as if here were a
mob of those malignant and ill-favored devils whom Dante has described and
the art of his age has painted and sculptured.