“It is about as bad a place for Injuns as there is in the whole route,” said the conductor.
“Yes,” said George, the driver; “and though I’m a white man, an’ agin an Injun all the time, I must say that we owe the badness of that there place to a white man.”
“How?” I asked.
“The Great Alamos,” answered the driver, “was a great buryin’-place of the Flat Noses. It was quite a large grove once—considerable of a rarity on these here plains. You know,” he continued, “that the Flat Noses bury their dead high up in the trees, or, where there are no trees, stick ’em up on trestles made with long poles.”
“They bury them in the air instead of in the ground,” I said, intending the remark as a sort of semi-joke, at which I designed smiling if any one else smiled, and, if not, to let it go for a serious observation. It was probably not new in either phase to my companions, who took no notice of it. So to break silence, I asked why the Indians of the plains sought these elevated resting-places for their dead.
“To keep ’em from being eaten up by the ki-o-tees.”
“Do the ki-o-tees devour the dead of other tribes?” I asked, horrified at the thought.
“The ki-o-tees is the wolves,” the conductor explained.
The lieutenant informed me of the orthography of the word—coyote.
About sunset we reached a house built of loose stones, and therefore known as “The Stone Ranch.” There were fifteen or twenty men about the ranch—all of them armed.