The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

And then they would picture how the revolutionists would continue the smoking of their cornstalk cigarettes and the drinking of the smuggled muscal.

This is not an exaggerated picture. A man could lie hidden in this brush and watch the country on every side of him, and see each of the few living objects which might pass over it in a day, as easily as he could note the approach of a three-masted schooner at sea. And even though troops came directly towards him, he had but to lie flat in the brush within twenty feet of them, and they would not know it. It would be as easy to catch Jack the Ripper with a Lord-Mayor’s procession as Garza with a detachment of cavalry, unless they stumbled upon him by luck, or unless he had with him so many men that their trail could be followed at a gallop. As a matter of fact and history, the Garza movement was broken up in the first three weeks of its inception by the cavalry and the Texas Rangers and the deputy sheriffs, who rode after the large bodies of men and scattered them. After that it was merely a chase after little bands of from three to a dozen men, who travelled by night and slept by day in their race towards the river, or, when met there by the Mexican soldiers, in their race back again. The fact that every inhabitant of the ranches and every Mexican the troops met was a secret sympathizer with Garza was another and most important difficulty in the way of his pursuers. And it was trying to know that the barking of the dogs of a ranch was not yet out of ear-shot before a vaquero was scuttling off through the chaparral to tell the hiding revolutionists that the troops were on their way, and which way they were coming.

And so, while it is no credit to soldiers to do their duty, it is creditable to them when they do their duty knowing that it is futile, and that some one has blundered. If a fire company in New York City were ordered out on a false alarm every day for three months, knowing that it was not a fire to which they were going, but that some one had wanted a messenger-boy, and rung up an engine by mistake, the alertness and fidelity of those firemen would be most severely tested. That is why I admired, and why the readers in the East should admire, the discipline and the faithfulness with which the cavalry on the border of Texas did their duty the last time Trumpeter Tyler sounded “Boots and Saddles,” and went forth as carefully equipped, and as eager and hopeful that this time meant fighting, as they did the first.

Their life in the field was as near to nature, and, as far as comforts were concerned, to the beasts of the field, as men often come. A tramp in the Eastern States lives like a respectable householder in comparison. Suppose, to better understand it, that you were ordered to leave your house or flat or hall bedroom and live in the open air for two months, and that you were limited in your selection of what you wished to carry with you to the weight of eighty pounds. You would find it difficult to adjust this eighty pounds in such a way that it would include any comforts; certainly, there would be no luxuries. The soldiers of Troop G, besides the things before enumerated, were given for a day’s rations a piece of bacon as large as your hand, as much coffee as would fill three large cups, and enough flour to make five or six heavy biscuits, which they justly called “’dobes,” after the clay bricks of which Mexican adobe houses are made. In camp they received potatoes and beans. All of these things were of excellent quality and were quite satisfying, as the work supplies an appetite to meet them. This is not furnished by the Government, and costs it nothing, but it is about the best article in the line of sustenance that the soldier receives. He sleeps on a blanket with his “bunkie,” and with his “bunkie’s” blanket over him. If he is cold, he can build the fire higher, and doze in front of that. He rides, as a rule, from seven in the morning to five in the afternoon, without a halt for a noonday meal, and he generally gets to sleep by eight or nine. The rest of the time he is in the saddle. Each man carries a frying-pan about as large as a plate, with an iron handle, which folds over and is locked in between the pan and another iron plate that closes upon it. He does his own cooking in this, unless he happens to be the captain’s “striker,” when he has double duty. He is so equipped and so taught that he is an entirely independent organization in himself, and he and his horse eat and sleep and work as a unit, and are as much and as little to the rest of the troop as one musket and bayonet are to the line of them when a company salutes.

THE MEXICAN GUIDE

We had for a guide one of the most picturesque ruffians I ever met. He was a Mexican murderer to the third or fourth degree, as Captain Hardie explained when I first met him, and had been liberated from a jail in Mexico in order that he might serve his country on this side of the river as a guide, and that his wonderful powers as a trailer might not be wasted.

He rejoiced in his liberty from iron bars and a bare mud floor, and showed his gratitude in the most untiring vigilance and in the endurance of what seemed to the Eastern mind the greatest discomforts. He always rode in advance of the column, and with his eyes wandering from the trail to the horizon and towards the backs of distant moving cattle, and again to the trail at his feet. Whenever he saw any one—and he could discover a suspected revolutionist long before any one else—the first intimation the rest of the scouting party would get of it was his pulling out his Winchester and disappearing on a gallop into the chaparral. He scorned the assistance of the troop, and when we came up to him again, after a wild dash through the brush, which left our hats and portions of our clothing to mark our way, we would find him with his prisoner’s carbine tucked under his arm, and beaming upon him with a smile of wicked satisfaction.

As a trailer he showed, as do many of these guides, what seemed to be a gift of second-sight cultivated to a supernatural degree. He would say: “Five horses have passed ahead of us about an hour since. Two are led and one has two men on his back, and there is one on each of the other two;” which, when we caught up to them at the first watering-place, would prove to be true. Or he would tell us that troops or Rangers to such a number had crossed the trail at some time three or four days before, that a certain mark was made by a horse wandering without a rider, or that another had been made by a pony so many years old—all of which statements would be verified later. But it was as a would-be belligerent that he shone most picturesquely. When he saw a thin column of smoke rising from a cañon where revolutionists were supposed to be in camp, or came upon several armed men riding towards us and too close to escape, his face would light up with a smile of the most wicked content and delight, and he would beam like a cannibal before a feast as he pumped out the empty cartridges and murmured, “Buena! buena! buena!” with rolling eyes and an anticipatory smack of the lips.

But he was generally disappointed; the smoke would come from a shepherd’s fire, and the revolutionists would point to the antelope-skins under their saddles, which had been several months in drying, and swear they were hunters, and call upon the saints to prove that they had never heard of such a man as Garza, and that carbines, revolvers, and knives were what every antelope-hunter needed for self-protection. At which the Mexican would show his teeth and roll his eyes with such a cruel show of disbelief that they would beg the “good captain” to protect them and let them go, which, owing to the fact that one cannot get a warrant and a notary public in the brush, as the regulations require, he would, after searching them, be compelled to do.