his abounding belief in Providence; Maury, his learning and his foreign decorations; Clark, his inimitable drollery and his broad Southern humor; Prevost, his French gallantry and wit; Broadwell, his generosity and his speculative views of the future; Bee, his theories of isothermal lines and cotton planting; and Parsons, and Standish and Conrow the shadow of a great darkness that was soon to envelop them as in a cloud-the darkness of bloody and premature graves.

The command was within three days' march of San Antonio. As it approached Mexico, the grass gave place to mesquite—the wide, undulating prairies to matted and impenetrable stretches of chapparal. All the rigid requirements of war had been carried out— the picquet guard, the camp guard, the advanced posts, and the outlying scouts, aimless and objectless, apparently, but full of daring, and cunning, and guile.

Pasturage was scarce this night, and from water to grass was two good miles. The artillery and commissary teams needed to be fed, and so a strong guard was sent with them to the grazing place. They were magnificent animals, all fat and fine enough to put bad thoughts in the fierce natures of the cow-boys-an indigenous Texas growth-and the unruly borderers.

They had been gone an hour, and the sad roll of the tattoo had floated away on the night air. A scout-Martin Kritzer-rode rapidly up to Shelby and dismounted.

He was dusty and tired, and had ridden far and fast. As a soldier, he was all iron; as a scout, all intelligence; as a sentinel, unacquainted with sleep.

"Well, Martin," his General said.

They are after the horses," was the sententious reply.

The cavalry soldier looked at his General in surprise. It was the first time in his life he had ever lost confidence in him. Such a question from such a source was more than he could well under. stand. He repeated slowly, a look of honest credulity on his bronzed face:

“Why do they want them?--well, because they are fine, fat, trained in the harness, scarce to find, and worth half their weight in gold. Are these reasons enough?"

Shelby did not reply He ordered Langhorne to report to him. He came up as he always came, smiling.

"Take fifty men," were the curt instructions, and station them a good half mile in front of the pasturing-place. There must be no bullets dropping in among our stock, and they must have plenty of grass room, You were on duty last night, I believe,"

"Yes, General."

"And did not sleep?"

"No, General."

"Nor will you sleep to-night. Station the men, I say, and then station yourself at the head of them. You will hear a noise in the night--late in the night-and presently a dark body of horsemen will march up, fair to see between the grass and the sky-line. You need not halt them. When the range gets good, fire and charge. Do you understand?"

In an hour Langhorne was at his post, silent as fate and terrible, couching there in his lair, with fifty good carbines behind him. About midnight a low note like thunder sprang up from toward San Antonio. The keen ear of the practiced soldier took in its meaning, as a sailor might the speech of the sea.

"Get ready-they are coming."

The indolent forms lifted themselves up from the great shadow of the earth. When they were still again they were mounted.

The thunder grew louder. What had before been noise was now shape and substance. Seventy-eight border men were riding down to raid the herders.

"Are you all loaded?" asked Langhorne.

'All. Have been for four years."

From the mass in front plain figures evolved themselves. Under the stars their gun-barrels shone.

"They have guns," sneered Langhorne, "but no scouts in front. What would Old Joe say to that?"

"He would dismount them and send them to the infantry," laughed John Kritzer.

The leading files were within fifty yards, near enough for a volley. They had not heard this grim by-play, rendered under the night and to the ears of an unseen death crouching in the prairie grass.

"Make ready!" Langhorne's voice had a gentleness in it, soft as a caress. The Methodist had turned lover.

Fifty dark muzzles crept out to the front, and waited there gaping.

"Take aim!" The softest things are said in whispers. The Methodist was about to deliver the benediction.

"Fire!"

A red cleft in the heart of the midnight-a murky shroud of dun and dark that smelt of sulphur-a sudden uprearing of staggering steeds and staggering riders-a wild, pitiful panic of spectres who had encountered the unknown-and fifty terrible men dashed down to the charge. Why follow the deadly work under the sky and the stars. It was providence fulfilling a vow-fate restoring the equi.

librium of justice-justice vindicating the supremacy of its immortal logic. Those who came to rob had been a scourge more dreaded than the pestilence-more insatiate than a famine. Defying alike civil and martial law, they had preyed alternately upon the people and the soldiers. They were desperadces and marauders of the worst type, feared and hated or both. Beyond a few scattering shots, fired by the boldest of them in retreat, they made no fight. The dead were not buried. As the regiment moved on toward San Antonio, thirty-nine could have been counted lying out in the grass -booted and spurred, and waiting the Judgment Day.

CHAPTER IV.

SAN ANTONIO, in the full drift of the tide which flowed in from Mexico, was first an island and afterward an oasis. To the hungry and war-worn soldiers of SHELBY's expedition it was a Paradise. Mingo, the unparalleled host of Mingo's Hotel, was the guardian angel, but there was no terror in his looks, nor any flaming sword in his hand. Here, everything that European markets could afford, was found in abundance. Cotton, magnificent even in its overthrow, had chosen this last spot as the city of its refuge and its caresses. Fugitive generals had gathered here, and fugitive senators and fugitive governors and fugitive desperadoes, as well, men sententious of speech and quick of pistol practice. These last had taken immediate possession of the city, and were rioting in the old royal fashion, sitting in the laps of courtesans and drinking wines fresh through the blockade from France.. Those passers-by who jeered at them as they went to and fro received a fusillade for their folly. Seven even had been killed-seven good Texan soldiers—and a great tear had fallen upon the place, this antique, half-Mexican city which had seen Fannin's new Thermopylæ, and the black Spanish death-flag wind itself up into the Alamo. When the smoke had cleared away and the powder-pall had been lifted, the black had become crimson.

First a speck and then a vulture, until the streets had become dangerous with desperadoes. They had plundered a dozen stores, had sacked and burnt a commissary train, had levied a prestamo upon the citizens, and had gone one night to "smoke out Tom Hindman,” in their rough border dialect. Less fortunate than Putnam, they found the wolf's den, and the wolf was within, but he showed his teeth and made fight. They hammered at his door furiously. A soft musical voice called out:

"What do you want?"

Hindman was a small man, having the will and the courage of a Highlander. Eloquent of speech, cool, a colloquial swordman whose steel had poison on it from point to hilt, audacious in plot, imperturbable in finesse, gray-eyed, proud at times to isolation, unsuccessful in the field, and incomparable in the cabinet, it was this manner of a man who had called out from behind his barricade.

The leader of the attacking party answered him:

"It is said that you have dealt in cotton, that you have gold, that you are leaving the country. We have come for the gold - that is all,"

“Indeed!" and the soft voice was strangely harsh and guttural now. "Then, since you have come for the gold, suppose you take the gold. In the absence of all law, might makes right."

He spoke to them not another word that night, but no man advanced to the attack upon the building, and when the daylight came, Shelby was in possession of the city. A deputation of citizens had traveled nearly twenty miles that day to his camp, and besought him to hasten forward, that their lives and their property might be saved. The camp was in deep sleep, for the soldiers had traveled far, but they mustered to the shrill bugle call, and rode on through the long night afterwards, for honor and for duty.

Discipline is a stern, chaste queen-beautiful at times as Semiramis, ferocious as Medea. Her hands are those of the priest and the executioner. They excommunicate, which is a bandage over the eyes and a platoon of musketry; they make the sign of the cross, which is the acquittal of a drum-head court-martial. Most generally the excommunications outnumber the genuflections.

D. A. Williams did provost duty on one side of the river, A. W. Slayback upon the other. What slipped through the hands of the first fell into those of the last. What escaped both fell into the water. Some men are born to be shot, some to be hung, and some to be drowned. Even desperadoes have this fatality in common with the Christians, and thus in the ranks of the plunderers there is predestination. Peace came upon the city as the balm of a southeast trade-wind, and after the occupation there was an ovation. Women walked forth as if to a festival. The Plaza transformed itself into a parterre. Roses bloomed in the manes of the horses- these were exotic; roses bloomed in the faces of the maidens these were divine. After Cannæ there was Capua. Shelby had read of Hannibal, the Carthagenian, and had seen Hannibal the elephant, and so in his mind there was no more comparison between the battle and the town than there was between the man and the animal. He would rest a little, much, many, glad and sunshiny days, filled full of dalliance, and dancing, and music.

Mingo's Hotel from a cloister had become to be a cantonment. It was noisy like a hive, vocal like a morning in May. Serenading parties improvised themselves. Jake Connor led them, an artillery officer, who sank like Mario and fought like Victor Emmanuel. In his extremes he was Italian. On the edge of all this languor and love, discipline, like a fringe, arrayed itself. Patrols paraded the streets, sentinels stood at the corners, from post to post martial feet made time, and in the midst of a flood of defeat, disaster, greed, overthrow, and rending asunder, there was one ark which floated hither and thither armed in a fashion unknown to Noah, bearing a strange barred banner at the fore-the Banner of the Bars. When its Ararat was found there was no longer any more Ark.