and I must sink down exhausted, I came suddenly upon group of Coahuila Indians, gathered around a clump of mesquite trees, the branches of which were crackling in the flames. With parched lips and tongue, swollen from the fierce heat, I tottered, almost fainting, into the midst of the group, and held out my empty canteen. A young woman seized the canteen and ran into a thicket hard by, returning with it in a few minutes filled with delicious, cool, clear water, from some hidden well, known only to themselves. I sought for it many a time afterwards, but never found it. I drank of the cool, life-giving liquid—sweeter than champagne or nectar, it seemed to me then (it is but just to the manufacturers of the articles named to say that I had no chance of making a fair comparison at the moment), and then with my blankets on the dry sand under a spreading mesquite, slept the sleep of the just.
When I awoke the Indians were all gone, save the pitying woman who had brought me the water. She was sitting- at a little distance off watching me, and as she saw me awakening, she ran and brought me another canteen of the cool water. Her language was a sealed book to me, as mine to her, and our conversation was necessarily limited to a few words of Spanish which pass current everywhere on the southwestern border, and are understood in their conventional meaning by all. She was barefooted and bareheaded, and marked with the small-pox. Her raiment was of the scantiest, and it was painfully evident that the stock of soap and Cologne water in the parental
