CHAPTER TWENTY.
A TRANSFORMATION.
It was well on in the afternoon of the following day before the four spoil-laden savages who had sought shelter in the cave again showed themselves outside.

Then came they filing forth, one after the other, in the same order as they had entered; but so changed in appearance that no one seeing them come out of the cavern could by any possibility have recognised them as the same men who had the night before gone into it.
Even their animals had undergone some transformation.

The horses were differently caparisoned; the flat American saddle having been removed from the back of the grand Kentucky steed, and replaced by the deep-tree Mexican _silla_, with its _corona_ of stamped leather and wooden _estribos_.

The mules, too, were rigged in a different manner, each having the regular _alpareja_, or pack-saddle, with the broad _apishamores_ breeched upon its hips; while the spoils, no longer in loose, carelessly tied-up bundles, were made up into neat packs, as goods in regular transportation by an _atajo_.
The two men who conducted them had altogether a changed appearance.
Their skins were still of the same colour--the pure bronze-black of the Indian--but, instead of the eagle's feathers late sticking up above their crowns, both had their heads now covered with simple straw hats; while sleeveless coats of coarse woollen stuff, with stripes running transversely--_tilmas_--shrouded their shoulders, their limbs having free play in white cotton drawers of ample width.

A leathern belt, and apron of reddish-coloured sheepskin, tanned, completed the costume of an _arriero_ of the humbler class--the _mozo_, or assistant.
But the change in the two other men--the chief and him addressed as Roblez--was of a far more striking kind.