There was no tiring him; his thin, sinewy, sun-hardened frame could bear enormous fatigue; moreover, the saddle was so familiar to him that he almost reposed in it.

If he had needed physical support, he would have found it in his mental energy.

He was capable of that executive furor, that intense passion of exertion, which the man of Latin race can exhibit when he has once fairly set himself to an enterprise.

He was of the breed which in nobler days had produced Gonsalvo, Cortes, Pizarro, and Darien.
These riders had set out at ten o'clock in the morning; at five in the afternoon they drew bridle in sight of the Apache encampment.

They were on the brow of a stony hill: a pile of bare, gray, glaring, treeless, herbless layers of rock; a pyramid truncated near its base, but still of majestic altitude; one of the pyramids of nature in that region; in short, a butte.