Page:The City of the Saints.djvu/467

Rh and claws are full grown, are able and willing to stand in their stead. Peter Rockwell was a man about fifty, tall and strong, with ample leather leggins overhanging his huge spurs, and the saw-handles of two revolvers peeping from his blouse. His forehead was already a little bald, and he wore his long grizzly locks after the ancient fashion of the United States, plaited and gathered up at the nape of the neck; his brow, puckered with frowning wrinkles, contrasted curiously with his cool, determined gray eye, jolly red face, well touched up with "paint," and his laughing, good-humored mouth. He had the manner of a jovial, reckless, devil-may-care English ruffian. The officers called him Porter, and preferred him to the "slimy villains" who will drink with a man and then murder him. After a little preliminary business about a stolen horse, all conducted on the amiable, he pulled out a dollar, and sent to the neighboring distillery for a bottle of Valley Tan. The aguardiente was smuggled in under a cloth, as though we had been respectables in a Moslem country, and we were asked to join him in a "squar' drink," which means spirits without water. The mode of drinking was peculiar. Porter, after the preliminary sputation, raised the glass with cocked little finger to his lips, with a twinkle of the eye ejaculated "Wheat!" that is to say, "good," and drained the tumbler to the bottom: we acknowledged his civility with a "here's how," and drank Kentucky-fashion, which in English is midshipman's grog. Of these "squar' drinks" we had at least four, which, however, did not shake Mr. Rockwell's nerve, and then he sent out for more. Meanwhile he told us his last adventure—how, when ascending the kanyon, he suddenly found himself covered by two long rifles; how he had thrown himself from his horse, drawn his revolver, and crept behind a bush, and how he had dared the enemy to come out and fight like men. He spoke of one Obry, a Frenchman, lately killed in a street-quarrel, who rode on business from Santa Fé to Independence, about 600 miles, in 110 hours. Porter offered, for the fun of the thing, to excel him by getting over 900 in 144. When he heard that I was preparing for California, he gave me abundant good advice—to carry a double-barreled gun loaded with buck-shot; to "keep my eyes skinned," especially in kanyons and ravines; to make at times a dark camp—that is to say, unhitching for supper, and then hitching up and turning a few miles off the road; ever to be ready for attack when the animals were being inspanned and outspanned, and never to trust to appearances in an Indian country, where the red varmint will follow a man for weeks, perhaps peering through a wisp of grass on a hill-top till the time arrives for striking the blow. I observed that, when thus speaking, Porter's eyes assumed the expression of an old mountaineer's, ever rolling as if set in quicksilver. For the purpose of avoiding "White Indians," the worst of their kind, he advised me to shun the direct route, which he