Page:The Overland Monthly Volume 5 Issue 3.djvu/26



delay was unavoidable, for it included catching horses and packing mules with rations; and as it invariably happens that excited teamsters and packers communicate their excitement to the animals, great difficulty was experienced in catching some of the indispensable mules. Neither are American cavalry soldiers like Mexican vagueros, ready at all times for travel with only a few yards of carne seca and a bag of pinole slung to the saddle-bow; the Mexican is also without those numerous little horseequipments which the American, having had them issued to him, can not lose, as he would be sure to find them again—on his pay-rolls —as army wags say. At last we were ready, and our strength was: Captain McCleave, Lieutenants French and Latimer, with one hundred men and five days' rations of hard-tack and uncooked salt-pork —the food on pack-mules. Each man had carbine, pistols, and sabre; also, forty rounds of ammunition. Three-fourths of us were badly mounted; but we set off in good spirits, followed by the good wishes and regrets of those who were left behind that they could not also go. At five P.M. we left camp—our course nearly due west toward that far-distant range of mountains bounding our horizon, in some one of whose many caftons it was surmised we might find what we sought. Onward we went; our quick walk was soon changed intoatrot. The guide, Juan—a Mexican, many years prisoner with the Apaches in these regions—rode at the head in company with McCleave.

The trail was fresh, and very plain; our spirits and blood were warm, not only with the hopes of recovering our losses, but-with confidence in our leader; and so for all that night and for three successive days and nights, we rode on without sleep or other food than the packed rations of hard biscuit and raw pork. But we kept on, and not a

man fell back, although at least sixty horses, as was expected from their condition at the start, fell down on the way. It seemed almost impossible to traverse a worse road than that which the Indians had, no doubt purposely, chosen to drive the stolen stock. It is a favorite policy with them to choose bad roads in such cases, experience having taught them that the pursuers, both man and beast, easily lose considerable of their initial energy when the pursuit offers continual and increasing difficulty. Thus calculating on the White Man's love of comfort, and the inability of his large and usually fat horses to stand the sudden fatigue, they hasten the spoil forward, killing those who lag behind, and content with getting even one-half of the stolen stock to their strongholds. In this way I have known them to drive a band of ten thousand sheep, stolen in New Mexico, over sixty miles daily, several days in succession, until the route was easily tracked by the dead carcasses. They had evidently adopted this policy on the present occasion, and in following their trail we had to pass over sharp, black, volcanic rocks, half buried in sanddiifts; ascending and descending continually hills so steep that nothing but the imperative necessity of keeping the trail could induce. On our third day of travel many of the horses began to fail. With animals an exhibition of fatigue seems to have a contagious character; and on the present occasion, when the disease was becoming pretty extensive, our Commandant, halting the troop, ordered a detail with instructions to kill all horses unable to keep up with the rest, and to break up the saddles; the riders to accompany us as foot-soldiers. This was promptly done, and before the night of the fourth day's march seventy horses had been thus treated, and there seemed little likelinood that more than ten of the remainder could sustain another day's march. But we all trudged