"I was with him"--the Indian--"when he was running his fifth round. It was about eight o'clock in the morning, and he was running at about eight miles an hour. At that time his competitor was about six miles behind him. I rode beside him for about four miles, when my horse had enough of it. There were a hundred Indians or more to see the race, and they had stations about every two miles on the trail, where they stopped the runners, rubbed them down, and gave them _pinola_, a parched corn, ground fine and mixed with water. The runners stopped one minute, or about that, at each station for rest. The Indian who won this race, although tired, finished in good shape, and took in about fifty dollars in stock." These contests in running are said to be one of the amusements of even the wildest of the Tarahumaris, although I doubt whether many white men have witnessed them. Even as early as the days when Grijalva, the discoverer of Mexico, and Cortes, its conquerer, landed on its shores where now is the important port of Vera Cruz, within twenty-four hours after their appearance an Aztec artist had made perfect representations of the fleet, the kind and amount of armament, and correct pictures of the artillery and horses (although he had never seen such things before), and had transmitted them nearly two hundred miles by carrier to the City of Mexico, placing them in the hands of the Aztec Emperor Montezuma. Cortes afterward found that the Aztec, Tlascalan, and other armies of that portion of the country always moved at a run when on the march, thus trebling and quadrupling the military marches of the present day. This was the first intimation to Europeans of the endurance and swift-footedness of the natives of the great Mexican plateau, and a similar characteristic was found to be almost universal among the Indians of the plateau. But it was afterward discovered that the people most prominent in this respect was one in the far north of New Spain, hidden away in the fastnesses of the Sierra Madres, whose very name, as given by other tribes, Tarahumari, meaning foot runners, indicated their special excellence. THE END. TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: Obvious printer errors have been corrected. Otherwise, the author's original spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been left intact. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of In the Land of Cave and Cliff Dwellers, by Frederick Schwatka