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Show 290 TALES OF THE COLORADO PIONEERS. pin calmly regarding him through the glass of his cur-tainless window, the corpse having been placed there during the night by some of his impish companions." CHAPTER LX. THE ESPINOSAS. In this city I met Thomas T. Tobin, an old Government scout. He was rather uncertain about his age, but from the incidents he cited, his wrinkled visage and mumbled words, I placed him at sixty. But there was not a gray hair in his head, and his eye was clear and sharp. He had just made his first journey on a railway, and was as timid as a child about getting on a street car, but when once fairly seated, he spent hours riding, just to see the city. He declared that he felt much safer on the broad prairies with his horse and rifle than among so many houses, where he was in constant fear of being taken in by sharpers or knocked down by robbers. Yet he is a man of undaunted courage, as the killing of the Espin-osas, Colorado's greatest assassins, will show. The Espinosas were two brutal, ignorant and superstitious Mexicans, accused of horse stealing at. first, and who killed one of a posse of soldiers, sent from Fort Garland to their house at Servietta, on the Conejos river, to arrest them. After which they seemed to be under the impression that if they killed a great many Americans and became formidable in their ferocity they would secure a pardon from the Governor, and perhaps a commission in the U. S. Army, as sometimes is the result of successful brigandage in Old Mexico. |