Next his eye fell upon a man in Mexican clothing, almost as dark and dirty too as the ordinary Mexican, but whose height, size, insolence of carriage, and ferocity of expression marked him as of another and more pugnacious, more imperial race.
"You are an American," said Coronado, in his civil manner, for he had two manners as opposite as the poles.
"I be," replied the stranger, staring at Coronado as a Lombard or Frankish warrior might have stared at an effeminate and diminutive Roman.
"May I ask what your name is ?" "Some folks call me Texas Smith." Coronado shifted uneasily on his feet, as a man might shift in presence of a tiger, who, as he feared, was insufficiently chained.

He was face to face with a fellow who was as much the terror of the table-land, from the borders of Texas to California, as if he had been an Apache chief.
This noted desperado, although not more than twenty-six or seven years old, had the horrible fame of a score of murders.

His appearance mated well with his frightful history and reputation.

His intensely black eyes, blacker even than the eyes of Coronado, had a stare of absolutely indescribable ferocity.

It was more ferocious than the merely brutal glare of a tiger; it was an intentional malignity, super-beastly and sub-human.
They were eyes which no other man ever looked into and afterward forgot.
His sunburnt, sallow, haggard, ghastly face, stained early and for life with the corpse-like coloring of malarious fevers, was a fit setting for such optics.