Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/496

 or stride at great speed, so as to throw out behind them a long red sash or band, depending from the breech-cloth, which is, in summer, the principal part of their attire. To this is added, in winter, a close-fitting gray or crimson under-shirt. They wear their thick, coal-black hair "banged" low on their foreheads, and bushy about their necks. The effect at a little distance is not unlike that of



the Florentine period, when the young gallants wore jerkins and trunk hose fitting them like their skins, and just such bushy locks, which they crowned, however, instead of going bare-headed, with jaunty velvet caps.

The fort is without guns, other than a howitzer for firing salutes, and has no strength, as it no longer needs to have, except from its position on a commanding bluff. The military policy of the government now is to station its troops along a railroad or other easy line of communi-