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He saw that they were all full-grown men that they were nude to the waist, and below the thighs that their breasts and arms were painted that they carried nought but their bows, quivers, and spears in short, that they were braves on the war-trail! Strangest sight of all to the eyes of the hatero was the leader who rode at the head of that silent band.
He pastured them upon the great plains on the eastern side of the Sierra Blanca where I was in the habit of going in my capacity of cibolero to hunt the buffaloes. The hatero and I became acquainted became friends. He invited me to visit his house, and I went. I saw Gabriella for the first time; and ever afterwards was her beautiful face before my eyes.
It was night, with an autumnal moon that moon whose round orb and silvery beams have been celebrated in the songs of many a harvest land. Not less brilliant fell those beams where no harvest was ever known upon the wild plain of the Llano Estacado. The lone hatero, couched beside his silent flock, was awakened by a growl from his watchful sheep-dog. Raising himself, he looked cautiously around.
He reflected; and in a few moments arrived at the conclusion that the White Chief he now saw could be no other than Carlos the cibolero! In that conjecture he was right. The first thought of the hatero had been to save his own life by remaining quiet. Before the line of warriors had quite passed him, other thoughts came into his mind.
It was supposed they had been out upon one of their usual hunts, and had fallen in with a roving band of savages. A party of dragoons, guided by the hatero, proceeded to the grove; and these returned with a very different version of the story. They had ascertained beyond a doubt that both the hunters had been killed, not by Indian arrows, but by the weapons of a white man.
He differed from all the rest in dress, in equipments, in the colour of his skin. The hatero saw that he was white! Surprised was he at first on observing this, but not for long. This shepherd was one of the sharpest of his tribe. It was he who had discovered the remains of the yellow hunter and his companion. He remembered the events of that time.
The hatero, although a descendant, and proud that he is so, of the Spanish settlers, has much intermixture of Indian and negro blood in his veins. Few of the Llaneros, indeed, could show a pedigree in which the Castilian blood was not sorely attenuated and diluted with that of half-a-dozen Indian or negro progenitors.
Long before, the flanking scouts had enclosed both him and his charge, and the next moment he was a captive! Part of his flock served for the supper of that band he would have betrayed. Up to the point where the hatero had been encountered, the White Chief and his followers had travelled along a well-known path the trail of the traders.
I would have joyed to believe it just; but whether just or not it had the effect of soothing me; and, silently accepting it, I permitted him to continue his narration. "I need not enter into the particulars of my wooing. Her father was a hatero, and owned large flocks of sheep.
A rough partition of mud-plastered twigs divides the Llanero's dwelling into unequal apartments; the lesser being reserved for the use of the females of the household, while the larger, furnished with half-a-dozen hides, the skin of a jaguar, and a couple of benches or stools ingeniously manufactured from bamboo, is the general reception-room, sleeping-apartment, and workshop for the hatero, when the floods are out, or when he takes a fancy at other times to shelter his head beneath a roof.
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