With Lieut. Browning I left to return to Mier, but half-way between Davis's rancho and Roma met the company in wagons which they had hired. All were well, but so weary and debilitated they had decided to go home. I continued on my way to see Col. Webb and get his ideas on the course to be pursued. I received his orders and left at two o'clock that night with his son, Mitchell, and Lieut. Browning; regained the company, called the men together, read their agreement to them, and said all I could to remind them of the obligations they were under to go on and fulfil their contract, but almost universal refusal met my appeal. Only twenty-one agreed to go on; what a falling off from ninety-eight! Out of those who agreed to go on two were cooks, two teamsters, two servants, and some few who said they did not care for the company, they only wanted to go to California. Can it be wondered at that I doubted such men? I left them all to reconsider their position, and went off to think over my own troubles, and make up my mind how to act. In half an hour I returned and told the men my determination. "I have thought of my position in the company, I have done all I could in the interests of the company, but now I am going home. I am not old enough to preach to you, but should you go home, let contentment and gratitude for what you have be gained by the hardships and sorrows you have endured, and may God bless those who go on, and those who return." So ended "Col. Webb's California Co." Fortune, always fickle, now changed. No steamer came to take us back; for two days we were quite determined to take the voyage homewards, but with returning health the men began to feel encouraged, and I thought perhaps I ought to make another effort to go on. I consulted all I could on the subject, and of course had varying opinions. Captain McCown said: "Go back, no one can do anything with volunteers, you have no power to compel obedience; now you go back honorably, and you don't know what you will have to endure on a march through Mexico." Lieut. Caldwell urged me to go on, said "it was military education never to give up, so long as there was any possibility of the original idea being carried out." Slowly I walked along thinking. I had not found the men disobedient, and I believed the cholera was the chief cause of discouragement, and the fact that Col. Webb had left the men in their distress the source of the anger against him. I decided that I could go on, and determined to make one more effort. That evening while sitting under an ebony tree, about eight o'clock, in the darkness which follows so rapidly on the short southern twilight, I heard a song from one of our company, and in a few minutes a chorus, good spirits seem to have returned, and leaving my seat I went over to Armstrong's Hotel.