" I said, "drop carefully down into the trail and
skirt closely along the wall until you come to Sergeant Cunningham's
position, and tell him the Indians are close by. Tell him also to
allow the two Indians in advance to pass unmolested."

I sent this order by the younger boy because I suspected he was
feeling that Corporal Frank's expedition to Jemez, with the adventures
of the return trip, had given him a certain prominence to be envied. I
meant Henry should divide honors with his brother hereafter.

The little corporal silently disappeared beneath the wall, and a few
minutes afterwards the two Indians entered the defile, and the goats
and sheep, which had been spread widely over the open valley,
scampered, crowded, and overleaped one another as they closed into the
narrow way. There seemed to be fully two thousand of them,
intermingled with a motley herd of horses, mules, asses, and kine of
all sizes and descriptions, numbering three hundred or more, all
driven by a party of seventy-three Indians.

The cattle-thieves were evidently congratulating themselves upon
having run the gantlet of the military camp and being out of danger,
for they had abandoned the traditional reserve of the Indian race, and
were talking loudly and hilariously as they passed my wing of the
ambuscade. The Indians fell completely into the trap, and they and the
cattle with them were captured without any difficulty.

During the winter our supply of grain ran short, and I sent a party,
with the Cordovas as guides, to Jemez. They were unable to get through
the snow, and the elder Cordova was so badly frost-bitten that in
spite of all we could do he died in the camp.

Then I went with a larger party, and was successful. On June 1st
orders came to break up the camp, and on the 9th the accumulated
stores of nineteen months' occupation were packed, and with a train of
ten wagons we set out for Santa Fe.

VI

CROSSING THE RIVER

Two days after my arrival at the Territorial capital I was ordered to
proceed alone to Los Pinos, a town two hundred miles south, in the
valley of the Rio Grande, and report to Captain Bayard, commanding
officer of a column preparing for a march to Arizona.

On reaching Algodones, on the eastern bank of the great river, I was
visited by a Catholic priest. He told me that Manuel Perea, the
Mexican lad with whom the boy corporals were so friendly at Santa Fe,
was a prisoner in the hands of Elarnagan, a chief of