When it ceased the stillness of the tomb prevailed for a while. We all returned to camp, and to sleep.
Not a drop of rain fell where we were. But the next morning when the second relief party went out they found the earth deluged six miles south of our camp, and rode through one basin where the water was belly-deep to their horses. They said the rain strip was two miles wide; and one mile south of it they found our boys; Waite and Wilkinson had found them early in the morning. They had traveled on about seven miles after they had found the bottle of brandy, and they were in earnest when they declared that had it not been for that stimulant they would have succumbed.
Another thing helped them: they held a bullet in their mouths, which caused the saliva to flow, which kept the mouth moist and they did not experience that dry, hot, hacking sensation in their throats that we did.
But when found they were very weak. Hudson was delirious. On the evening of the 30th of July they arrived in camp, where we remained three days resting and recuperating from this disaster. Benson was the only man of our party not present.
Hosea and the negro soldiers that went with him to Laguna Plata, with the exception of the colored soldier with us, found the lake near morning of the 29th.
At this lake occurred an act on the part of the mulatto sergeant which was a disgrace to manhood, and purchased the sergeant a home in the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for a period of twenty years at hard labor, when he should have been shot, as Mathias said, with all the buffalo-guns on the range. This sergeant refused to go back to the relief of his officers and comrades, and ordered his squad not to return. But one did disobey him, and followed Hosea with forty-four canteens full of water, and they struck the back track.
Faithful Hosea returned to where he found the previous night's halt; found that the soldiers had taken one course, we another. He followed the soldiers until he felt assured they would get to the Double Lakes or Laguna Sabinas. He thought they could not miss both, as they were nearly in sight of them then. Hosea turned and crossed that thirty miles of trackless waste to the Casa Amarilla, and found us the morning of the 31st.
The sergeant and his men put back to Fort Concho; and we hunters went east to our old battle-ground at the head of Thompson's cañon, where we found Benson, who had left the soldiers, after traveling half the day of the 29th, and when night came on he lost his horse and had walked the rest of the way, he being ninety-six hours without water. When we came to where he was he was as crazy as a bug. It was three weeks before his mind was thoroughly restored.
Here we found our missing pack-mules. Now we were all together, not losing a man, after undergoing one of the most horrifying experiences that ever fell to mortals' lot on land. We read of horrors of the sea, where castaways resorted to cannibalism when they became frenzied, where seemingly there was nothing else could be done and live. But here in this great "Lone Star State," with water all around us, was a party of strong men who became demoralized by thirst, which, together with intense heat, will weaken the body and impair the mental faculties far quicker than hunger or any other calamity that can happen to man.
The soldiers first found Laguna Rica, then the Double Lakes, where Captain Lee was encamped at the time; but in covering the vast distance from where they left us they had killed and drank the blood from twenty-two of their horses; and yet five of them died on the route. So Lieutenant Ward told us when he went out from Fort Concho afterward, with a part of his company, and buried the dead.