“Indeed!” contemptuously retorted the leader of the cuartilla. “You’re a gringo, Señor Vicente Barajo! You forget the errand we’re upon; and that we are riding shod horses? Indians don’t go out from Port Inge and then direct to the Alamo to do—no matter what. I suppose you understand me?”
“Oh true!” answered Señor Vicente Barajo, “I beg your pardon, Don Miguel. Carrambo! I did not think of that.”
And without further protest, the three coadjutors of El Coyote fell into his tracks, and followed him in silence—scarce another word passing between him and them, till they had struck the chapparal, at a point several miles above the opening of which Barajo had made mention.
Once under cover of the thicket, the four men dismounted; and, after tying their horses to the trees, commenced a performance that could only be compared to a scene in the gentlemen’s dressing-room of a suburban theatre, preliminary to the representation of some savage and sanguinary drama.
Chapter Forty Two.
Vultures on the Wing.
He who has travelled across the plains of Southern Texas cannot fail to have witnessed a spectacle of common occurrence—a flock of black vultures upon the wing.
An hundred or more in the flock, swooping in circles, or wide spiral gyrations—now descending almost to touch the prairie award, or the spray of the chapparal—anon soaring upward by a power in which the wing bears no part—their pointed pinions sharply cutting against the clear sky—they constitute a picture of rare interest, one truly characteristic of a tropical clime.