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There were Frenchmen, smelling rank of garlic and mutton tallow; Basques with eyes as blue and vacant as the summer skies; young Mormons working on shares, whose whole fortune was wrapped up in the one huddle of sheep which they corralled and counted so carefully; and then the common herders, fighting Chihuahuanos, with big round heads and staring eyes, low-browed Sonorans, slow and brutal in their ways, men of all bloods and no blood, lumped together in that careless, all-embracing Western term "Mexicans."
And though the poor browbeaten Chihuahuanos understood not a word of English they felt somehow that they had been overzealous and shuffled back to their blankets, like watchdogs that had been rebuked. "Now," said the sheepman, taking his hand from his gun, "what can I do for you, Mr. Hardy?"
"Very well," said Creede, "move 'em, and move 'em quick. I give you three days to get through that pass." He stretched a heavily muscled arm very straight toward the notch in the western hills and turned abruptly away. Hardy swung soberly in behind him and the frightened Chihuahuanos were beginning to breathe again after their excitement when suddenly Jeff stopped his horse.
As he came into camp the Chihuahuanos dropped their plates, reached for their guns, and stood in awkward postures of defence, some wagging their big heads in a braggartly defiance, others, their courage waning, grinning in the natural shame of the peasant. In Hardy they recognized a gentleman of categoría and he never so much as glanced at them as he reined in his spirited horse.
He continued the sentence by a comprehensive sweep of the hand from that spot out through the western pass, favored each of the three Chihuahuanos with an abhorrent scowl, and rode slowly away down the hogback. "Notice anything funny over on that ridge?" he asked, jerking his head casually toward the east.
Not one of those veiled threats and intimations had he confided to Creede, for the orders from Judge Ware had been for peace and Jeff was hot-headed and hasty; but in his own mind Hardy pictured a solid phalanx of sheep, led by Jasp Swope and his gun-fighting Chihuahuanos, drifting relentlessly in over the unravaged mesa.
There's six hundred of us; and that's about as big an army as usually travels in these parts." "But who? What are they?" "They are of all sorts and colours. There's the Chihuahuanos and Passenos, and niggurs, and hunters, and trappers, and teamsters. Your humble servant commands these last-named gentry. And then there's the band of your friend Seguin " "Seguin! Is he " "What?
Without looking to the right or to the left, Jefferson Creede fixed his eyes upon one man in that riot of workers and rode for him as a corral hand marks down a steer. It was Jasper Swope, hustling the last of a herd through the narrow defile, and as his Chihuahuanos caught sight of the burly figure bearing down upon the padron they abandoned their work to help him.
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