common ground with _anyone_. I have seen him with Presidents, diplomats,
Irish section-hands, Mexican peons, Indians, authors, scientists and
"society." Within an hour or so he was easily the Center. Not
unconscious of his power, he had an extraordinary and sensitive modesty,
which handicapped him through life among those who had the "gift of
push." He never put himself forward either in person or in his writing.
But something about him fascinated all these far-apart classes of
people, when he spoke. His command of English, French, Spanish, and
German might have been expected; but his facility in acquiring the
"dialects" of railroad men and cowboys, or the language of an Indian
tribe, was almost uncanny. When he first visited me, in Isleta, he knew
just three words of Tigua. In ten days he could make himself understood
by the hour with the Principales in their own unwritten tongue. Of
course, this was one secret of his extraordinary success in learning the
inner heart of the Indians.

I saw it proved again in our contact with the Quíchua and Aymará and
other tribes of Peru and Bolivia.

I have known many scholars and some heroes--but they seldom come in the
same original package. As I remember Bandelier with smallpox alone in
the two-foot snows of the Manzanos; his tens of thousands of miles of
tramping, exploring, measuring, describing, in the Southwest; his year
afoot and alone in Northern Mexico, with no more weapon than a
pen-knife, on the trails of raiding Apaches (where "scientific
expeditions" ten years later, when the Apache was eliminated, needed
armed convoys and pack-trains enough for a punitive expedition, and
wrote pretentious books about what every scholar has known for three
hundred years) I deeply wonder at the dual quality of his intellect.
Among them all, I have never known such student and such explorer lodged