The next day, from a couple of friends, leading men in times of peace, but nowhere in such times, we learned what the plot was. The low class hated our presence in their midst, and business success, and in their bitterness would drive us from the country or kill us. The $23 matter was to be used as a pretext for the attack, hoping thereby to provoke retaliation as a further excuse for shooting us down, and in case of failure his confederates were to reinforce him.
They seemed to calculate pretty safely that a dozen of them, at least, could dispatch _one_ unarmed Yankee. A calculation very different from that which they boasted at the opening of the war, that "one Southern man could whip just one dozen Yankees." Yes, our assailant swore vehemently that "he preferred fighting Yankees at home rather than in the field." We replied, "very likely, if unarmed."
The friends advised us to leave the place, as they feared secret assassination. We took their advice, and left for San Antonio, one hundred and sixty-five miles west, where we took our family in a few weeks, and spent the winter of 1864-5. On the first day of March, 1865, the writer took an ambulance stage--a sort of private irregular affair--for Matamoras, having for company, beside the driver, a lady and two children, going to her husband there, and placed under our care. The driver had never been through on the route before. We got along quite well the first three or four days, having a change of mules each day. But one afternoon we took the wrong road, and brought up ten o'clock at night, lost in the middle of, so to speak, a shoreless prairie. The mules exhausted, the driver turned them out to graze for the night, with forty feet of stake rope between each pair.
The lady and her children were settled for the night in the stage, and the driver and ourself took the accustomed ground bed. At break of day the writer awoke, and raised his head to look for the grazing _mulos_, but could not see nor hear them. Suspecting they might have taken leave of absence, the driver was instantly awakened, and he followed the rope trail in the road we had come the night before, a half a mile back, and then it suddenly changed to the right oblique, and was lost in the trackless prairie grass. The sun was two hours high, and it was Sunday morning. It felt like Sunday all round. No sign of civilized life in view on that ocean prairie. Here and there could be seen, forty and eighty rods off, the hungry Spanish wolf seated in quiet watchfulness, and patiently longing for a human meal. Our provision box was nearly empty; the children were crying for water, and we had none, and could not tell when we would have any. Nine o'clock came, and no driver nor mules yet. He had gone northward, and the writer struck out toward the rising sun in search of the missing animals. We had gone about a mile, and saw a mile or two further in the distance two men on horseback, driving a large herd of cattle and horses. We followed them as rapidly as our pedestrian qualities would permit, and when on an elevation, within possible hailing distance, say half a mile, we raised an Indian whoop, and imagined ourselves considerable of an Indian in the whooping line just then, as there was a strange feeling of life and death about it. We succeeded in making them hear, got their attention, and by waving a white signal, succeeded in drawing them to us. They were Mexicanos, not able to understand a word of English. Fortunately we could make them understand the situation, in their own language, the Spanish. We gave them two Spanish dollars to go and hunt the mules. They were gone an hour and returned, handing back our money, saying the _umbra_ had the mules. We took but one dollar, giving them the other for their honesty. "Adios, Senor," and off they rode. Just then we saw the driver coming with the mules, two miles off. At first they looked like one immense animal about forty feet high, mounted by a man twenty feet more. This illusive effect was produced by the prairie mirage. About noon the mules were in harness again and moving.