mash things."

But the quartermaster said he'd tried it with those very mules, between
Emory and Medicine Bow a dozen times, and he'd risk it. The driver could
get off his seat if he wanted to, and run alongside, but he'd stay where
he was.

"Let me out, please," said the engineer, and jumped to the ground, and
then the cavalcade pushed on again. The driver, as ordered by an
employer whom he dare not disobey, let the reins drop on the mules'
backs, the troopers falling behind, the yellow ambulance and the big
baggage wagon bringing up the rear.

Then, with a horseman on each side, the mules were persuaded to push on
again, and then when fairly started Burleigh called to the troopers to
fall back, so that the mules should not, as he expressed it, "be
influenced." "Leave them to themselves and they can get along all
right," said he, "but mix them up with the horses, and they want them to
take all the responsibility."

And now the command was barely crawling. Brooks, heavy, languid with
splitting headache, lay in feverish torpor in his ambulance, asking only
to be let alone. The engineer, a subaltern as yet, felt that he had no
right attempting to advise men like Burleigh, who proclaimed himself an
old campaigner. The aide-de-camp was getting both sleepy and impatient,
but he, too, was much the quartermaster's junior in rank. As for Dean,
he had no volition whatever. "Escort the party," were his orders, and
that meant that he must govern the movements of his horses and men by
the wishes of the senior staff official. And so they jogged along
perhaps twenty minutes more, and then there was a sudden splutter and
plunge and stumble ahead, a sharp pull on the traces, a marvelously
quick jerk back on the reins that threw the wheel team on their
haunches, and thereby saved the "outfit," for when men and matches were
hurried to the front the lead mules were discovered kicking and
splashing in a mud hole. They were not only off the road by a dozen
yards, but over a bank two feet high.

And this last pound broke the back of Burleigh's obstinacy. It was
nearly midnight anyway. The best thing to be done was unhitch, unsaddle
and bivouac until the gray light of dawn came peering over the eastward
prairie, which in that high latitude and "long-day" month would be soon
after three. Then they could push on to Reno.

Not until nearly eight o'clock in the morning, therefore, did they heave
in sight of the low belt of dingy green that