THE LONE RANCHE

CHAPTER ONE.

A TALE OF THE STAKED PLAIN.

"HATS OFF!"

Within the city of Chihuahua, metropolis of the northern provinces of
Mexico--for the most part built of mud--standing in the midst of vast
barren plains, o'ertopped by bold porphyritic mountains--plains with a
population sparse as their timber--in the old city of Chihuahua lies the
first scene of our story.

Less than twenty thousand people dwell within the walls of this North
Mexican metropolis, and in the country surrounding it a like limited
number.

Once they were thicker on the soil; but the tomahawk of the Comanche and
the spear of the Apache have thinned off the descendants of the
_Conquistadores_, until country houses stand at wide distances apart,
with more than an equal number of ruins between.

Yet this same city of Chihuahua challenges weird and wonderful memories.
At the mention of its name springs up a host of strange records, the
souvenirs of a frontier life altogether different from that wreathed
round the history of Anglo-American borderland. It recalls the cowled
monk with his cross, and the soldier close following with his sword; the
old mission-house, with its church and garrison beside it; the fierce
savage lured from a roving life, and changed into a toiling _peon_,
afterwards to revolt against a system of slavery that even religion
failed to make endurable; the neophyte turning his hand against his
priestly instructor, equally his oppressor; revolt followed by a deluge
of blood, with ruinous devastation, until the walls of both _mission_
and military _cuartel_ are left tenantless, and the redskin has returned
to his roving.

Such a history has had the city of Chihuahua and the settlements in its
neighbourhood. Nor is the latter portion of it all a chronicle of the
olden time. Much of it belongs to modern days; ay, similar scenes are
transpiring even now. But a few years ago a stranger entering its gates
would have seen nailed overhead, and whisked to and fro by the wind,
some scores of objects similar to one another, and resembling tufts of
hair, long, trailing, and black, as if taken from the manes or tails of
horses. But it came not thence; it was human hair; and the patches of
skin that served to keep the bunches together had been stripped from
human skulls! They were _scalps_--the scalps of Indians, showing that
the Comanche and Apache savages had not had it all their own way.