I had crossed four ranges and was winding along a narrow, dense-grown valley when night began to fall. The rumors of foul play led me to keep a hand hanging loose near my weapon, though the few natives I met seemed friendly enough. Darkness thickened and I was planning to swing my hammock among the trees when I fell upon the hut of Coronado Cordón. It was a sieve-like structure of bamboo, topped by a thick palm-leaf roof, with an outdoor mud fireplace, and crowded with dogs, pigs, and roosted fowls. Coronado himself, attired in the remnants of a pair of cotton trousers, greeted me from his hammock.
"To be sure, señor. You may sleep on this bench under the roof."
But I produced my hammock and he swung it for me from two bamboo rafters of the low projecting eaves, beside his own and that of a horseman who had also sought hospitality, where a steady breeze swept through. His wife squatted for an hour or more over the fireplace, and at length I sat down--on the ground--to black coffee, frijoles, tortillas, and a kind of Dutch cheese.
Long before morning I was too cold, even under most of the contents of my pack, to sleep soundly. It was December and the days were short for tramping. This one did not begin to break until six and I had been awake and ready since three. Coronado slept on, but his señora arose and, covering her breasts with a small apron, took to grinding corn for tortillas. These with coffee and two eggs dropped for a moment in hot water, after a pin-hole had been broken in each, made up my breakfast, and brought my bill up to nearly eleven cents.
I was off in the damp dawn. Any enumeration of the rocky, slippery, twisting trails by which I panted up and over perpendicular mountain ridges under a burning sun without the shadow of a cloud, would be wearisome. Sweat threatened to ruin even the clothing in my bundle, it soaked even belt and holster, rusting the weapon within it, and leaving a visible trail behind me. Once, at the careless nod of an Indian, I strained up an all but perpendicular slope, only to have the trail end hundreds of feet above the river in a fading cow-path and leave me to climb down again. Farther on it dodged from under my feet once more and, missing a reputed bridge, forced me to ford a chest-deep river which all but swept me away, possessions and all, at the first attempt.