"The Loot of Loma" by Lord Dunsany

This feels like a weird mix of North American and Mesoamerican things. The hazard of an Irishman writing a story about native American...

Wigwams are characteristic of northwestern tribes, as are totems, but gold idols and the other goodies they looted all sound far more Central or even South American. The name Loma doesn't sound to me very indian at all, although I grew up on the east coast where I suppose we should expect the languages spoken were noticeably different from those of the west coast tribes. Although... the Algonquian language family did extend very far westward, it appears, so maybe not so radically different after all? But I can't say with any certainty either way.

And mules? They aren't native to North America, so this story must be set in a time after European contact. But I've never heard of Native Americans adopting mules. Horses absolutely, but mules? I mean, maybe? But it's not something they are noted for. I would expect to the extent natives did adopt mules, it was likely more common in Mexico and points further south, not so much in what would become the United States or Canada. But maybe I'm wrong, I'm hardly an expert on the mule. If you know your history of the mule in the Americas, leave a comment below!

The picture used is an illustration for the story by Sidney Sime.

To follow along: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13821/13821-h/13821-h.htm#loma

My book version of this story was so bad, by the second paragraph it had devolved into literal gibberish. I had to give up and print out the online version of the text to read from instead. How utterly shameful.

But even then, although the text is clear enough, there are quite a few sentences that feel incomplete, or syntactically wrong. Maybe I just didn't understand how to parse them, I struggle parsing a lot of Dunsany's sentences, but this felt like an unusually poorly written story at a grammatical level. The plot and themes are still interesting, the technical aspects of the writing are the problem here.