observation and deep reasoning. Both were now stirred to the
core, but neither showed a trace of it on his face. They watched the
little file pass away over the prairie until it was lost to sight behind
the swells, and then Smith spoke:

"I reckon you an' me, Hank, will ride toward the Alamo."

"I reckon we will, Deaf, and that right away."

Inside of five minutes they were on the road, armed and provisioned, the
best two borderers, with the single exception of the Panther, in all the
southwest. They were mounted on powerful mustangs, which, with proper
handling and judicious rests, could go on forever. But they pushed them
a little that afternoon, stopped for two hours after sundown, and then
went on again. They crossed the Colorado River in the night, swimming
their horses, and about a mile further on stopped in dense chaparral.
They tethered the mustangs near them, and spread out their blankets.

"If anything comes the horses will wake us," said Smith.

"I reckon they will," said Karnes.

Both were fast asleep in a few minutes, but they awoke shortly after
sunrise. They made a frugal breakfast, while the mustangs had cropped
short grass in the night. Both horses and men, as tough and wiry as they
ever become, were again as fresh as the dawn, and, with not more than a
dozen words spoken, the two mounted and rode anew on their quest. Always
chary of speech, they became almost silence itself as they drew nearer
to San Antonio de Bexar. In the heart of each was a knowledge of the
great tragedy, not surmise, but the certainty that acute intelligence
deduces from facts.

They rode on until, by a simultaneous impulse, the two reined their
horses back into a cypress thicket and waited. They had seen three
horsemen on the sky line, coming, in the main, in their direction. Their
trained eyes noticed at once that the strangers were of varying figure.
The foremost, even at the distance, seemed to be gigantic, the second
was very long and thin, and the third was normal. Smith and Karnes
watched them a little while, and then Karnes spoke in words of true
conviction.

"It would be hard, Deaf, for even a bad eye to mistake the foremost."

"Right you are, Hank. You might comb Texas with a fine-tooth comb an'
you'd never rake out such another."

"If that ain't Mart Palmer, the Ring Tailed Panther, I'll go straight to
Santa Anna an' ask him to shoot me as a fool."

"You won't have to go to Santa Anna."

Smith rode from t