rd all preliminary advantage.

The Mexican had left behind him a wake of closed doors and an empty
street, but now people were beginning to emerge from their places of
refuge with assumed unconsciousness of anything having happened. Many
citizens who knew the ranger pointed out to him with alacrity the
course of Garcia's retreat.

As Buckley swung along upon the trail he felt the beginning of the
suffocating constriction about his throat, the cold sweat under the
brim of his hat, the old, shameful, dreaded sinking of his heart as it
went down, down, down in his bosom.

*****

The morning train of the Mexican Central had that day been three hours
late, thus failing to connect with the I. & G.N. on the other side of
the river. Passengers for /Los Estados Unidos/ grumblingly sought
entertainment in the little swaggering mongrel town of two nations,
for, until the morrow, no other train would come to rescue them.
Grumblingly, because two days later would begin the great fair and
races in San Antone. Consider that at that time San Antone was the hub
of the wheel of Fortune, and the names of its spokes were Cattle,
Wool, Faro, Running Horses, and Ozone. In those times cattlemen played
at crack-loo on the sidewalks with double-eagles, and gentlemen backed
their conception of the fortuitous card with stacks limited in height
only by the interference of gravity. Wherefore, thither journeyed the
sowers and the reapers--they who stampeded the dollars, and they who
rounded them up. Especially did the caterers to the amusement of the
people haste to San Antone. Two greatest shows on earth were already
there, and dozens of smallest ones were on the way.

On a side track near the mean little 'dobe depot stood a private car,
left there by the Mexican train that morning and doomed by an
ineffectual schedule to ignobly await, amid squalid surroundings,
connection with the next day's regular.

The car had been once a common day-coach, but those who had sat in it
and gringed to the conductor's hat-band slips would never have
recognised it in its transformation. Paint and gilding and certain
domestic touches had liberated it from any suspicion of public
servitude. The whitest of lace curtains judiciously screened its
windows. From its fore end drooped in the torrid air the flag of
Mexico. From its rear projected the Stars and Stripes and a busy
stovepipe, the latter reinforcing in its suggestion of culinary
comforts the general sugg