apon--for it did not appear to be a regular cavalry
corps. Lances with red pennons, muskets, carbines and double-barrelled
guns were hanging from the saddle-bows.

Some of the men were cleaning their horses, while others were lying on
the sand under the shelter of the cacti; a little further back were a
number of mules advancing towards the halting-place, and behind them
again, some twenty carts, heavily laden.

Visible to the eyes of the eagle, in the road along which these
travellers must have passed, were corpses of men and animals strewn on
the arid plain, marking the bloody track of this band of adventurers.
Doubtless our readers have already recognised the Gold-seekers under the
command of Don Estevan de Arechiza.

When the mules and the carts joined the horsemen, the mules were
unharnessed and the horses unsaddled; the carts were unloaded and then
linked together with iron chains, while the saddles of the animals were
piled upon one another, and served with the cacti to fill up the spaces
between the wheels and form a formidable barricade. The animals were
tied to the carts, and the cooking utensils placed by the side, of the
brushwood brought from a distance; a portable forge was established; and
this colony, which seemed as though it had risen from the ground as by a
miracle, was soon busily employed, while the anvil resounded with the
blows which were fashioning horses' shoes and repairing wheels.

A man richly dressed, but whose clothes were faded with sun and dust,
alone remained on horseback in the middle of the camp, looking earnestly
around him. This man was the chief of the troop. Three other men were
occupied meanwhile in fixing the poles of a tent, and then placing on
its summit a red banner on which was painted a scutcheon with six golden
stars on an azure ground, with the motto, "I will watch." The chief
then alighted, and after having given an order to one of his men, who
mounted and left the camp he entered the tent. All these preparations
had occupied barely half-an-hour, so much were they simplified by habit.

To the right of the camp, but far distant, arose from the sand a mass of
gum-trees and _ironwoods_, the only trees produced by these arid plains.
Here a second troop had halted. They had neither carts nor baggage
mules, but were about double the number of the other party. By the
bronzed complexions of the riders, some almost naked, others covered
with skins and with waving plume