His two names denoted the extent of his ranging ground, for he was generally known among his own race as "Oregon Ol.," and by the Indians of the Mexican border as "the Ocelot," that being the wild cat of the Mexicans (Ocelolt, in Aztec), a trifle less than the jaguar, but, muscularly speaking, very powerful and no joke for ferocious courage.
In the same way as this well-known guide possessed several names, he could boast various reputations. The United States Army officers wrote him down as kindly, never downhearted in sun or snow, skilful, honest to a button's worth, disinterested, knowing woodcraft thoroughly, always ready, aye, even to help a friend out of pocket, canteen, or with his wits, bold to temerity when boldness was the best card, "reliable," and sticking to his man, friend or foe, to the last gasp.
For the redskins, Oliver was quite other game: he inspired superstitious terror blended with admiration; no one ever succeeded in contests of cunning with him; implacable towards anyone who sought to injure or even annoy him, he would pursue the molester or molesters, one or many, to their final hiding place, cutting off stragglers, reducing the band like a man devouring a bunch of grapes, one by one, and knifing the last at his lone campfire. "That will teach them," he would say, when reproached by new coming dragoon officers, at the forts, who thought it unseemly for a white man to decorate his leggings with human hair like the reds. He meant that his punishment was to save, by its recital filling the Indians with dread, many another white man on the debatable ground, brother hunter, comrade trapper, emigrant, settler, pioneer, railway prospector.
We say "brother" hunter and "comrade" trapper, for Oregon Oliver only shot animals; to him, any other means of obtaining fur and feather would have been ignoble.
Up to some five years back he had been in the habit of transmitting money, acquired by the sale of peltries, by piloting wealthy foreigners over the hunting grounds in fashion, and by schooling army officers in frontier warfare, to some relation in the Eastern States, who had succeeded his parents as the embodiment of the ideal of home; but death having removed this claim, as he generously conceived it to be, upon his purse, he had no need to toil as formerly he did, and he led an easy life, following for the most part his own sweet free will, over the ten thousand miles which separate Southern America from the Polar Seas.
These two men, as opposite in nature and station as well could be, had made acquaintance in the most natural manner.
Mr. Gladsden wanted a guide into Sonora, and the colonel at Fort Fillmore, with whom he had been quail shooting, had recommended "the champion guide."
Once on the road to Arispe, studded with hamlets, all of them, perhaps, increased in importance since Gladsden's previous stay in Sonora, a conductor was superfluous. At least he was under that impression.
Hunters never dally with a meal; a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes at the most suffice, then, if there be more time to spare, there is a chat amid tobacco smoke. Thus acted our two adventurers.
The rest of the provender was restored to the alforjas, and Oliver filled a sweet corncob pipe, whilst Mr. Gladsden selected an excellent regalia in a prettily carved Guayaquil wood box. As soon as they were both under a cloud, they mused for a while in silence.