“Well, when everything had quieted down like, he went and bought the land on which the well was placed and set a bunch of Mexicans to clean it out. Of course, the well had got filled up with dirt and so on from caving in. After they’d dug a while the Mexicans struck bones. They hollered up to the white man that they had struck bones and that all they lacked now was to pull up the goods. The white man, he hollered down to them that they needn’t do any more digging and for them to come on up so as to let him down. Nach’rally, being as they had struck them bones, the Mexicans wasn’t very slow about getting out.
“When the white man got down there, the first thing he done was to grab hold of a corner of an old maleta what he seen sticking out among the bones. He jerked it out and it had the dollars in it all right. Then he looked up and yelled to the Mexicans to pull. He hadn’t more’n got the words outen his mouth when he seen a tall skileton standing alongside the wall of that well. Its feet was close to him and it must have been twenty, maybe forty, feet tall. It reached clear up to the top, and its face away up there was a-looking down at the white man. He couldn’t take his eyes offen it, and all the way up while those Mexicans was a-pulling him slow and jerky he had to look that skileton in the face. [[57]]He forgot all about that maleta of money and dropped it back, and when he clumb out he was so weak that they had to help him on his horse. They managed to get him home and put him in bed, and that night he died. And there ain’t nobody what I know of as has undertook to get out them six jack loads of silver since.”
[1] This last legend was printed in the Dallas Times-Herald, October 22, 1922, and in other papers over the state about the same time, I having given it to the press in the hope of creating a wider interest in legends. [↑]
NATIVE TREASURE TALK UP THE FRIO
By Fannie Ratchford
His name was Zeno, but he answered with equal indifference and slowness to Bruno, Juno, and Zero. He was a goat-herder who had been hired to help with the fall shearing, and though he was not more than fourteen years of age, long following after flocks of goats along dusty roads had given him the slow, shambling gait of an old man and fixed on his small, wizened face an expression not unlike that of the patriarchs of the flocks he drove.
One night at the supper table my cousin expressed disgust that a certain Mexican, upon whom he had been depending for help with the shearing, had seen some sort of supernatural light on the mountains, and had betaken himself off to hunt for the buried treasure that such a light indicates. As the conversation turned upon the subject of this superstition, I saw Zeno’s face light up with an expression of interest and intelligence altogether new to it. But he said nothing. Indeed, I think, up to that time I had never heard him speak.
After supper, when he and a small boy who lived on the ranch had withdrawn to the darkness of the lawn, I heard a thin, shrill, defiant voice saying, “That’s the truth, and anybody can laf that wants to.”