Mr. Gladsden went to England to imitate his friend and comrade by sacrificing to Hymen.
He married, and had two sons. They were still young when he lost their beloved mother, and ere long, in accordance with that very contra-French custom of keeping the children in leading strings which pushes the British boy into life beyond the home, they dwelt remote from him at school. He was, therefore, a lonely man. Politics had no attraction to one still active, fox hunting was tame after his American experience, and yachting was baby play to a genuine mariner.
Gladsden had already shown his remembrance of Mexico by investing heavily in its Western Railway, and hence he was confidently approached by the promoters of that link which should make it fully transcontinental, and by the later projectors, who sought to establish the line between Guaymas and that running down through the wild lands to Santa Fe, El Paso, Topeka, and thus binding the cactus country to that of wheat, corn, and cattle.
From joining the board of the latter companies to volunteering to go out and investigate the causes of a prodigious slowness in building the line was an affair of short duration. Mr. Gladsden's offer was gladly accepted, and he started with alacrity, which proved how deep had been his longing to break away from social trammels.
This time he proceeded overland from New York, and finally surveyed the route of the Great Southern Pacific Railway as far as El Paso. There a chance speech overheard in the Continental House, which enclosed a reference to the rich land proprietor, don Benito de Bustamente, changed his purpose to proceed still westwardly. He engaged a guide and horses, and was, at the beginning of May, traversing the Sierra de las Animas, or Mountains of All Souls.
On the twenty-fifth of that month, going on four of the afternoon, a time clearly indicated by the disproportionately long shadows of the trees on the sandy soil of the savannah, and the coppery red colour of the sun, which appeared like a fiery disc at the level of the lowermost branches, we see Gladsden and his guide mounted on native horses. The superior wore for old acquaintance sake the costume of Mexican rancheros, and his attendant the picturesque and typical garb of the hunter of the West. They were both armed to the teeth, as a matter of course, for, in this quarter, all honest men are exposed to the three heads of the Southwestern Cerberus: that of the "rustlers," or white desperadoes; of the bandoleros, or Mexican thieves; and of the wild Indians, none of them uniting with either of the others, but true Ishmaels.
It was remarkable that the prairie guide, however, had acceded to the progress of improvement in firearms, in lieu of the long and heavy rifle so celebrated along the backbone of the continent in the hands of the trapper and hunter, this man carried, like his employer, a finely finished Winchester breech-loading and repeating rifle, much stronger and larger than the general pattern.
The pair had just emerged from an immense forest of cedar, which had never yet known the woodman's threat, though doomed ere long to feed a locomotive engine's furnace, and were glad to cry halt at the skirts of the covert. Then they trotted down to a pretty stream, which was one of the sources of the Yaqui River, and bending so far to the westward as to make an inexperienced explorer fancy it had something to do rather with the San Miguel.
Indeed, the woodsman examined the muddy waters with serious heed for a long time, and executed some mental calculations in that wonderful untaught trigonometry of the frontiersman. Then, stopping his broncho by a scarcely perceptible pressure of his knees, he bent gracefully towards his employer, and said, as he smiled good-humouredly:
"Hyar you hev it, Mr. Gladsden; this ar the safe ford, though the melting snow has set the sink pits filling, of which I war speaking this noonday."