The squatters disguised themselves as redskins; and when they had put on their garments, which rendered it impossible to recognise them, they completed the metamorphosis by painting their faces of different colours.
Assuredly the traveller whom accident had brought at this moment to the jacal would have fancied it inhabited by Apaches or Comanches.
The garments which the squatters had taken off were locked up in the chest, of which Red Cedar took the key; and the four men, armed with their American rifles, left the cabin, mounted their horses, which were awaiting them ready saddled, and started at full gallop through the winding forest paths.
At the moment they disappeared in the gloom Ellen stood in the doorway of the cabin, took a despairing glance in the direction where they had gone, and fell to the ground murmuring sadly,—
"Good Heaven! What diabolical work are they going to perform this night?"
[CHAPTER VII.]
THE RANGERS.
On the banks of the Rio San Pedro, and on the side of a hill, stood a rancheria composed of some ten cabins, inhabited by a population of sixty persons at the most, including men, women and children. These people were Coras Indians, hunters and agriculturists, belonging to the Tortoise tribe. These poor Indians lived there on terms of peace with their neighbours, under the protection of the Mexican laws. Quiet and inoffensive beings, during the nearly twenty years they had been established at this place they had never once offered a subject of complaint to their neighbours, who, on the contrary, were glad to see them prosper, owing to their gentle and hospitable manners. Though Mexican subjects, they governed themselves after their fashion, obeying their caciques, and regulating in the assembly of their elders all the difficulties that arose in their village.
On the night when we saw the squatters leave the cabin in disguise, some twenty individuals, armed to the teeth and clothed in strange costumes, with their faces blackened so as to render them unrecognizable, were bivouacked at about two leagues from the rancheria, in a plain on the river's bank. Seated or lying round huge fires, they were singing, laughing, quarrelling or gambling with multitudinous yells and oaths. Two men seated apart at the foot of an enormous cactus, were conversing in a low tone, while smoking their husk cigarettes. These two men, of whom we have already spoken to the reader, were Fray Ambrosio, chaplain to the Hacienda de la Noria, and Andrés Garote, the hunter.