But the Mexicans did not accept the challenge. Save for the little scouting parties that always kept a watch at a safe distance they remained within their intrenchments. But Bowie and Fannin were able to take a look at the fortifications, confirming in every respect all that Ned and his comrades had told them.
They ate in the saddle at noon, having provided themselves with rations when they started, and then rode back on their slow half circle about the town, Mexican scouts riding parallel with them on the inner side of the circle, five hundred yards away. The Texans said little, but they watched all the time.
It made a powerful appeal to Ned, who had been a great reader, and whose mind was surcharged with the old romances. It seemed to him that his comrades and he were like knights, riding around a hostile city and issuing a formal challenge to all who dared to meet them. He was proud to be there in such company. The afternoon waned. Banks of vapor, rose and gold, began to pile up in the southwest, their glow tinting the earth with the same colors. But beauty did not appeal just then to the Ring Tailed Panther, who began to roar.
"A-ridin', an' a-ridin'," he said, "an' nothin' done. Up to San Antonio an' back to camp, an' things are just as they were before."
"A Texas colonel rode out on the prairie with ninety men, and then rode back again," said Obed.
"But we are not going back again!" cried Ned joyfully.
Bowie, who was in the lead, suddenly turned his horse away from the camp and rode toward the river. The others followed him without a word, but nearly every man in the company drew a long breath of satisfaction. Ned knew and all knew that they were not going back to camp that night.
Ned eagerly watched the leader. They rode by the Mission Concepcion, passed through a belt of timber and came abruptly to the river, where Bowie called a halt, and sprang from his horse. Ned leaped down also, and he saw at once the merits of the position into which Bowie had led them. They were in a horseshoe or sharp bend of the river, here a hundred yards in width. The belt of thick timber curved on one side while the river coiled in a half-circle about them and in front of the little tongue of land on which they stood, the bank rose to a height of eighteen feet, almost perpendicular. It was a secluded place, and, as no Mexicans had been following them in the course of the last hour, Ned believed that they might pass a peaceful night there. But the Ring Tailed Panther had other thoughts, although, for the present, he kept them to himself.
They tethered the horses at the edge of the wood, but where they could reach the grass, and then Bowie placed numerous pickets in the wood through which an enemy must come, if he came. Ned was in the first watch and Obed and the Ring Tailed Panther were with him. Ned stood among the trees at a point where he could also see the river, here a beautiful, clear stream with a greenish tint. He ate venison from his knapsack as he walked back and forth, and he watched the last rays of the sun, burning like red fire in the west, until they went out and the heavy twilight came, trailing after it the dark.
Ned's impression of mediævalism that he had received in the day when they were riding about San Antonio continued in the night. They had gone back centuries. Hidden here in this horseshoe, water on one side and wood on the other, they seemed to be in an absolutely wild and primitive world. Centuries had rolled back. His vivid imagination made the forest about them what it had been before the white man came.