"Be conservative, Captain. Investigate, and try to quiet matters, but be conservative, quite conservative, Captain."
"Yes, sir, Governor, all right. I'll be conservative—as conservative as the circumstances will permit."
"Now, do that, Captain. Just quiet matters, and I'll send you reinforcements at once. Only be as conservative as possible till they come."
Captain Bill wasted no time in his preparation. The train would leave in half and hour, and he didn't stop to pack a dress suit. He notified McCauley, and gathered up a young fellow named Marsden, who had Ranger ambitions, and started with such clothes and guns as he had on.
It is a slow, roundabout way from Alice to Rio Grande City. You have to go from Alice over to Corpus Christi and there wait for a train that takes you down to Harlingen. Then at Harlingen you must wait for another train to take you to Sam Fordyce, and at Sam Fordyce you can hire a hack that will carry you to Rio Grande City, unless you are waylaid and murdered along that lonely road which follows the river and winds between a thick growth of cactus, mesquite and all the thorny rank vegetation of that sandy semi-tropical land. Starting from Alice in the forenoon, one with good luck may reach Rio Grande City by ten o'clock at night, though it will be safer to wait at Sam Fordyce until next morning. Those who travel from Sam Fordyce to Rio Grande City after nightfall, go armed, and need to.
Captain Bill had good luck on the way down. While waiting for the Harlingen train at Corpus Christi he fell in with Sam McKenzie, his ranger, who had been on a scout in that section, and at Harlingen he found Blaze Delling, who had resigned from Company B to become U.S. River Guard. He brought both men along, and with a force like that he felt able to cope with a mob of whatever size or nationality. Of course, nothing was known at Rio Grande City of the increase in the Ranger army. It had been given out there that Captain McDonald and one man had been ordered down, and that reinforcements would follow, accordingly as Governor Lanham had wired.
The day was well along when the little army finally reached Sam Fordyce and secured a conveyance for the final stage of their journey. An old frontiersman by the name of Inman, who owned a hack and pair of small mules, agreed to undertake the journey. It was late in the afternoon when they started.
Night fell, clear and starlight, but there was no moon, and the narrow winding southern road hedged thickly with mesquite and yucca and cactus growth was dark enough, except here and there where it opened to the river or to a hacienda (Mexican ranch), with its half dozen thatched huts, or hackles, surrounded by brush fences.
The Rangers drove along quietly, speaking in low voices when they spoke at all, peering into the darkness ahead, for they had no knowledge of what conditions were awaiting them, or what they were likely to meet along the way. Besides, it is the Ranger practice to go warily on dark nights and not traverse an unknown road with festivity and boisterous mirth.