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Waiting till midnight, we saddled and packed and made a wide detour to the west, striking the road again perhaps four miles nearer Lampasos, which we reached safely late in the next afternoon; our grand old camp-guard, Curly, in better condition than either of us.

With Cress too ill to travel, the next morning I left Crawford to care for him, bade farewell to good old Don Abran, and started for Lampasos with Thornton and Curly. We nooned at Santa Cruz, a big sheep ranch midway between Musquiz and Progreso, leaving there about two o'clock.

Two mornings later the Mexican National Express dropped us at the Lampasos depot about daylight, from which we made our way over a mile of dusty road winding through mesquite thickets to the Hotel Diligencia, on the main plaza. A norther was blowing that chilled us to the marrow, and of course, according to usual Mexican custom, not a room in the hotel was heated.

Better take a pretty strong party, for the authorities thought it necessary to give me a cavalry escort from Lampasos to Musquiz and back. And, by the way, pick up a boy named George E. Thornton, Socorro, N. M., on your way south. While only a youngster, he is one of the best all-round frontiersmen I ever saw, and speaks Spanish tolerably. Had him with me in the Gallup country."

Well recommended to General Treviño from kinsmen of his wife, who was a daughter of General Ord of our army, he gave me a letter to Captain Abran de la Garza, commanding at Musquiz, directing him to furnish me any cavalry escort or supplies I might ask for, and the following day we started north from Lampasos on our one-hundred-mile march to Musquiz.