“You mustn’t go!” exclaimed Tom. “You will be certain to be captured, and you know better than we can tell you what they will do to you.”
“I know it perfectly well. But I have no kith or kin to worry their heads about me, and I can go as well as anybody. I know right where they are——”
“But you have got to go along the road that the Indians are coming,” said the civilian, who was utterly astounded by my proposition.
“I know that too, but somebody must go, or leave those fellows to be killed. Come and shake hands with me, boys, and let me go.”
“You are a brave lad, and I hope you will come out all right,” said Frank, as the boys came up one after the other. Elam and Tom didn’t have a word to say, but they were badly cut up. Bob’s eyes were filled with tears, and he clung to me with both hands.
“Carlos, I am sorry that you have come to this decision,” said he. “Why can’t somebody else go? You have been with me so long that you are like a brother to me.”
“The best of brothers must part some time or other,” said I. “If I fall nobody will be the wiser for it, except you fellows right around here. Good-by, everybody,” I cried, and with a circular sweep of my arm to include all hands, I wheeled my horse and started on my lonely journey. “There are some fellows who will be sorry if anything happens to me,” I soliloquized. “During the time I have been with them I have never made anybody mad, and that’s a heap to say for a man who has been to Texas. Now the next thing for me is to look out for myself.”
In spite of all this delay, occasioned by asking and answering so many questions, not more than five minutes elapsed before I was on my way to warn the cowboys. One learns to think rapidly when living on the frontier, and while we talked we worked. In a few minutes I was beyond reach of the grove, and taking my horse well in hand rode forward at about half pace, and in half an hour more this grove was out of sight behind the swells and the last glimpse of the ranch had disappeared. I was alone on the prairie, and a feeling of depression I had never before experienced came over me. I kept my horse at half pace because I didn’t know how soon he would be called upon to exert himself to the utmost, and I did not want to ride a wearied nag in my struggle for life. The horse knew that there was something going on, for he kept his eyes and ears constantly on the alert, and having more faith in him than I had in myself, I watched him closely. I was certain that he would smell an Indian long before I could see him.
At the end of another half hour I began to wonder why I did not see some signs of the cowboys, but there was nothing in sight. Nothing, did I say? Away off to the left loomed up a body which was lying in the grass. I couldn’t tell whether it was a beef or a horse, for it was about half a mile away. My horse discovered it at the same time and snorted loudly.
“There is something over there as sure as you are a foot high,” said I to myself, looking all around to see what sort of a place I was going to get in. I didn’t like the appearance of things where that body lay. On all sides of it, except the one by which I entered, was a ravine, and it was so deep that I could just see the tops of the willows growing up out of it—a splendid place indeed for an ambuscade. I didn’t want to go in there, and that was the long and short of it. “I must go in there and see what that is,” said I, after taking note of all these little things. “It may be something that will tell me of the fate of the cowboys.”