een killed or
wounded, but without success. Then they followed after Saldar's gang,
but it seemed to have disappeared. Manning concluded that the wily
Mexican had recrossed the river after his theatric farewell. And,
indeed, no further depredations from him were reported.

This gave the rangers time to nurse a soreness they had. As has been
said, the pride and honour of the company is the individual bravery of
its members. And now they believed that Jimmy Hayes had turned coward
at the whiz of Mexican bullets. There was no other deduction. Buck
Davis pointed out that not a shot was fired by Saldar's gang after
Jimmy was seen running for his horse. There was no way for him to
have been shot. No, he had fled from his first fight, and afterward
he would not return, aware that the scorn of his comrades would be a
worse thing to face than the muzzles of many rifles.

So Manning's detachment of McLean's company, Frontier Battalion, was
gloomy. It was the first blot on its escutcheon. Never before in the
history of the service had a ranger shown the white feather. All of
them had liked Jimmy Hayes, and that made it worse.

Days, weeks, and months went by, and still that little cloud of
unforgotten cowardice hung above the camp.

III

Nearly a year afterward--after many camping grounds and many hundreds
of miles guarded and defended--Lieutenant Manning, with almost the
same detachment of men, was sent to a point only a few miles below
their old camp on the river to look after some smuggling there. One
afternoon, while they were riding through a dense mesquite flat, they
came upon a patch of open hog-wallow prairie. There they rode upon the
scene of an unwritten tragedy.

In a big hog-wallow lay the skeletons of three Mexicans. Their
clothing alone served to identify them. The largest of the figures had
once been Sebastiano Saldar. His great, costly sombrero, heavy with
gold ornamentation--a hat famous all along the Rio Grande--lay there
pierced by three bullets. Along the ridge of the hog-wallow rested
the rusting Winchesters of the Mexicans--all pointing in the same
direction.

The rangers rode in that direction for fifty yards. There, in a little
depression of the ground, with his rifle still bearing upon the three,
lay another skeleton. It had been a battle of extermination. There was
nothing to identify the solitary defender. His clothing--such as the
elements had left distinguishable--seemed to be of the kin