e cocks were boastfully crowing paeans to their own victories, past
and to come, in shrill and ill-timed but uninterrupted concert, bronze
wings flapping, crimson crests truculently tossing insolent challenge
for all comers.

With the one plan of my trip completely smashed, I felt too much upset
to continue the interview, and excused myself. But after a forenoon
spent alone beside the broad and swift current the Sabinas was pouring
past me, gazing at the dim blue mountain-crests in the west that I had
learned marked its source, the irresistible call to penetrate the
unknown impressed and then possessed me so completely that, at our
midday breakfast, I announced to the Captain I had decided to follow
the river to its head, and pass thence into the desert for a
thirty-days' circle to the north and west.

"But, _valga nu Dios_, man," he objected, "I have no force I can spare
for sufficient time to give you adequate escort for such a journey. It
would be madness to undertake it with less than fifty men. I am
responsible to my General for your safety, and cannot sanction it.
Beyond the Alamo Canon the only waters are in isolated springs in the
plains and in natural rain-fall tanks along the mountain crests, known
to none except the Indians and Tomas Alvarez, an old half-breed
Kickapoo long attached to my command as scout, who ranged that country
years ago with his tribe, and who guides my troop on such short scouts
as we have been able to make beyond the Alamo, and--"

"Pardon," I ventured to interrupt, "that will do nicely; give me
Alvarez and one good trustworthy soldier, and we'll make the circle
without trouble."

"Six of you! Why, you'd never get twenty miles out of town in that
direction. I can't permit it."

"Pardon again, Don Abran," I broke in, "but we have for years been
accustomed to move in small parties through country that held a hundred
times more hostiles than you have here, and you can trust us to take
care of ourselves. Go we shall in any event, without your men if you
withhold them."

"Well, well, _hijo mio_," he responded, "if you are bound to go, we
will see. Only I shall write my General that I have sought to restrain
you."

To us the prevailing local fears seemed absurd. Admittedly there were
only sixteen of the Lipans then left, men, women, and children, their
chief, Juan Galan, the son by a Lipan squaw, of the father of Garza
Galan, then the leading merchant of the town, and later a