ten o'clock in the morning
If he had needed physical support , he would have found it in his mental energy . He was capable of that executive furor , that intense passion of exertion , which the man of Latin race can exhibit when he has once fairly set himself to an enterprise . He was of the breed which in nobler days had produced Gonsalvo , Cortes , Pizarro , and Darien . These riders had set out at ten o'clock in the morning ; at five in the afternoon they drew bridle in sight of the Apache encampment . They were on the brow of a stony hill : a pile of bare , gray , glaring , treeless , herbless layers of rock ; a pyramid truncated near its base , but still of majestic altitude ; one of the pyramids of nature in that region ; in short , a butte . Below them lay a valley of six or eight miles in length by one or two in breadth , through the centre of which a rivulet had drawn a paradise of verdure . In the middle of the valley , at the head of a bend in the rivulet , was a camp of human brutes .