gaged regularly in
smuggling, as the most profitable enterprise offering. American hams,
I remember, were then sixty cents a pound, and everything else in
proportion. Even in the city of Monterey, stores that displayed on
their open shelves little but native products, had warehouses where you
could buy (at three times their value in the States) almost any
American or European goods you wanted.

Well recommended to General Trevino from kinsmen of his wife, who was a
daughter of General Ord of our army, he gave me a letter to Captain
Abran de la Garza, commanding at Musquiz, directing him to furnish me
any cavalry escort or supplies I might ask for, and the following day
we started north from Lampasos on our one-hundred-mile march to Musquiz.

The first two days of the journey, for fully sixty miles, we travelled
across the lands of Don Patricio Milmo, who thirty years earlier had
arrived in Monterey, a bare-handed Irish lad, as Patrick Miles.
Through thrift, cunning trading, and a diplomatic marriage into one of
the most powerful families of the city, he had oreid his name and
gilded the prospects of his progeny, for he had become the richest
merchant of Monterey and the largest landholder of the state.

On this march north Curly's value was well demonstrated. The first two
nights I divided our little party into four watches, so that one man
should always be awake, and on the _qui vive_. But it took us no more
than these two nights to discover that Curly was a better guard than
all of us put together. Throughout the noon and early evening camp he
slept, but as soon as we were in our blankets he was on the alert, and
nothing could move near the camp that he did not tell us of it in low
growls, delivered at the ear of one or another of the sleepers.
However, nothing happened on the journey up, save at the camp just
north of Progreso, where some of the villagers tried slip up on our
horses toward midnight, and Curly's growls kept them off. Their trails
about our camp were plain in the morning. The evening of the third day
we reached Musquiz, one of the oldest towns of the northern border,
nestled at the foot of a tall sierra amid wide fields of sugar cane,
irrigated by the clear, sweet waters of the Sabinas.

At eight o'clock the next morning I called on Captain Abran de la
Garza, the _Comandante_, to present my letter from General Trevino.

Like the monarch of all he surveyed, he received me in his bed-chamber.