Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1894 edition. Excerpt: ... xxv on carlos," said Vitorino, throwing another log upon the fire, which caught his tall shadow and twisted it and set it dancing against the rocky walls of the canon in which we were camped for the night, "did you ever hear why the Wolf and the Deer are enemies?" And as he spoke he stretched out near me, looking up into my face to see if I were going to be interested. A few years ago it would have frightened me very seriously to find myself thus--alone in one of the remotest corners of New Mexico save for that swarthy face peering up into mine by the weird light of the camp-fire. A stern, quiet but manly face it seems to me now; but once I would have thought it a very savage one, with its frame of long, jet hair, its piercing eyes, and the broad streak of red paint across its cheeks. By this time, however, having lived long among the kindly Pueblos, I had shaken off that strange, ignorant prejudice against all that is unknown--which seems to be inborn in all of us--and wondered that I could ever have believed in that brutal maxim, worthy only of worse than savages, that "A good Indian is a dead Indian." For Indians are men, after all, and astonishingly like the rest of us when one really comes to know them. I pricked up my ears--very glad at his hint of another of these folk-stories. "No," I answered. "I have noticed that the Wolf and the Deer are not on good terms, but never knew the reason." " St, senor," said he, --for Vitorino knows no English, and most of our talk was in Spanish, which is easier to me than the Tee-wahn language, --" that was very long ago, and now all is changed. But once the Wolf and the Deer were like brothers; and it is only because the Wolf did very wickedly that they are enemies. Con su licencia, senor. "1 ..".