de camp. For
what other purpose had they come to this patch of woods?

At last I heard the stamping of horses, and I lay still for a while and
peered all about me for signs of the animals or their possessors. I
moved slowly, then, so as to bring first this open space in line with my
eyes, and then that, until, crawling like a lizard, I found my men. They
were lying on the ground, wrapped in blankets, all asleep, very near the
other end of the grove. In the last open spot of the timber, screened
from view from the prairie by clumps of willows and other bushes, were
six horses, picketed for grazing. There were two grays, a black, two
bays and a chestnut sorrel--the latter clearly a race-horse. They were
all good horses. There were rifles leaning against the trees within
reach of the sleeping men; and from under the coat which one of them was
using for a pillow there stuck out the butt of a navy revolver.

Something--perhaps it was that consciousness which horses have of the
approach of other beings, scent, hearing, or a sense of their own which
we can not understand--made the chestnut race-horse lift his head and
nicker. One of the men rose silently to a sitting posture, and reached
for his rifle. For a moment he seemed to be looking right at me; but his
eyes passed on, and he carefully examined every bit of foliage and every
ant-hill and grass-mound, and all the time he strained his ears for
sounds. I held my breath. At last he lay down again; but in a few
minutes he got up, and woke the others.

This was my first sight of Bowie Bushyager. Everybody in Monterey
County, and lots of other people will remember what the name of Bowie
Bushyager once meant; but it meant very little more than that of his
brother, Pitt Bushyager, who got up, grumbling and cursing when Bowie
shook him awake. Bowie was say twenty-eight then, and a fine specimen of
a man in build and size. He was six feet high, had a black beard which
curled about his face, and except for his complexion, which was almost
that of an Indian, his dead-black eye into which you could see no
farther than into a bullet, and for the pitting of his face by smallpox,
he would have been handsome.

"Shut up!" said he to his brother Pitt. "It's time we're gittin' our
grub and pullin' out."

Pitt was even taller than Bowie, and under twenty-five in years. His
face was smooth-shaven except for a short, curly black mustache and a
little goatee under his mouth His eyes were la