ut the preparations for breakfast were hurried. Before
six o'clock the mules were harnessed, the horses were saddled, and all
things were made ready for a diligent push southward. It had been a
difficult business to get Ned Crawford out of his tent, but here he was,
trying his best to move his legs as if they belonged to him. His coffee
and corn-cakes did a great deal for him, and he made out to pretend to
help Pablo in getting the fat pony ready for the road. Then, however, he
was willing to see Pablo walk away, and he bravely led the pony to the
side of what may have been an old and apparently abandoned ant-hill.

"I can get on board," he said, as if his patient quadruped had been the
_Goshhawk_. "I saw how some of them mounted. You put your left foot into
the stirrup, and then you make a kind of spring into the saddle. If my
knees will bend for me, I can do it without anybody's help."

It was the ant-hill that helped him, for he did not make any spring.
After his foot was in the stirrup, he made a tremendous effort, and he
arose slowly, painfully to the level of the pony's back. Then his right
leg went over, and he was actually there, hunting a little nervously for
the other stirrup, with his machete away around behind him.

"Glad you have done it!" exclaimed a decidedly humorous voice near the
pony's head. "We are all ready to be off now. Before long, you will be
able to mount as the rancheros do, without touching the stirrup. But
then, I believe that most of them were born on horseback."

They also appeared to be able to do pretty well without much sleep, for
Ned could not see that they showed any signs of fatigue. The
camping-place was speedily left behind them, but it was no longer a
night journey. Ned was almost astonished, now that the darkness was
gone, to discover that this was by no means a wild, unsettled country.
Not only were there many farms, with more or less well-built houses, but
the cavalcade began to meet other wayfarers,--men and women,--on foot
and on horseback, and hardly any of them were willing to be passed
without obtaining the latest news from Vera Cruz and from the war.

"I guess they need it," thought Ned. "The general says there are no
newspapers taken down here, and that, if there were, not one person in
five could read them. They seem a real good-natured lot, though."

So they were, as much so as any other people in the world, and they were
as capable of being developed and educated