"Let us return to camp at once," said both the ladies, and back they went quicker than they came.
It is ten o'clock at night, the guards are on duty, and all retire, the ladies behind the ambulance curtains, and the officer and Lew on a blanket before the camp-fire. The wolves come in and howl an hour or two within a few rods of the fires, in search of camp offals. The eyelids of the fair ones refuse sleep. At last a charge is made on the lank, hungry creatures, and a volley fired into their ranks by the guards, and they are routed and return not for the night, and then _Somnus_ commands all in quiet rest for the next six hours. At seven in the morning breakfast is over, and the advance leads out again, followed an hour later by the traveling _partie carree_.
The next six days of travel furnish no great variety of scenery or excitement, except in the social department, which seemed never to cloy. Otherwise, the trip, for the most part, was but a daily experience of repeated routine. All eyes and ears became familiar with sights and sounds by night and by day. Immense droves of cattle and horses were seen grazing right and left over the wide-spread prairies, and occasionally lank hunger was seen sitting at the mouth of his hole, in some sand bank or mound, or at the roots of some lone veteran tree, looking wistfully at the travelers, seeming to say to them, "How I would like to feast on your starved carcasses!" A bullet from the Lieutenant's rifle keeled one back into his hole, and scared another, tearing a rabbit for his breakfast so bad that he made lightning speed northward, and never slacked for the mile he was in sight, and at the brow of the hill, where his _narrative_ became invisible, its last motion seemed to speak back and say, "I never heard a rifle before." And probably it was the fact--and on he went, as if resolved on never stopping till he got to the north pole, for fear he might hear another.
On the seventh day the weary travelers stood on the banks of the far famed "Rio Grande," at Brownsville, opposite the city of Matamoras, in the State of Tamaulipas, Mexico. The Lieutenant here ordered the advance into camp to wait his return. And then he crossed the "Rio" with the exiles, and remained with them till they were located in a pleasant suite of three rooms fronting on the "Grand Plaza," near the magnificent Cathedral. He made the excuse to himself that it was necessary for him to act as special protector to the ladies, till they were sufficiently familiarized with the ways of that strange people, to be able to make their own way, till he could see them again, and perhaps in nearer and dearer relations.