"Are you the soldiers?" shouted a chorus of voices from the coach as it came up. "Yes." "You can catch them yet; they tried to stop us and rob us; and would have done, but for hearing you." The troop did not draw bridle, but wheeled away on to the prairie in pursuit of half a dozen moving figures on whom they were easily gaining. A minute later a voice in front cried: "All right; we'll give in. Don't fire." "Why, those are not Indians," said Trias in astonishment. Nor were they; they were six Mexican brigands who had been pursuing the mail; the Apaches were probably safe long ago, in one of their forest camps. The highwaymen were soon seized and bound, and as it was ultimately discovered that they were some of the revolutionaries for whom Trias was on the look-out, the night-ride was not altogether a wild-goose chase. CHAPTER XVII ACROSS THE UNITED STATES IN A WAGGON From the foregoing chapter it will have been seen that Mexico, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was not a neighbourhood wherein a man might look to find rest and quiet; and it is safe to say that if any one part of it was less to be desired than another as a place of resort, it was the United States frontier. When the war between Mexico and the United States ended in 1847, this frontier had to be overhauled and settled afresh, and within the next two years Presidents Polk and Taylor appointed a Boundary Commission. One of the commissioners was the late John Russell Bartlett, secretary to the New York Ethnographical Society, and subsequently one of the greatest authorities on the Indian races. Mr. Bartlett did not leave New York for his southward journey till the summer of 1850, and one of the first lessons that he learned on that journey was that redskins, like other men, cannot be understood from books or from mere surface examination. Anxious to see as much as possible of the Indians of the southern States, he elected to travel by waggon, there being no immediate hurry for him to present himself at El Paso. Such a course meant passing through wild regions of prairie, plain, and hill, peopled by Missouris, Choctaws, Bannocks, Comanches, Chicasas, Araphoes, and perhaps a score more of savage tribes, the majority of whom still regarded the white man as their natural enemy; and the details of that ride, with his subsequent adventures in and round Mexico, would occupy more than the whole of this book.