It was to no purpose that I appeared in all the vigor of health and strength. I might outrun the wildest bull of the buffalo herd; I might spring upon the half-trained "mustang," and outstrip the antelope in her flight; I might climb the wall-like surface of a cliff, and rob the eagle of her young: but when I came back, the cry of welcome that met me was, "Bravo, Lépero!" And thus did I bear about with me the horrid badge of that dreary time when I dwelt within the Lazaretto of Bexar. The very fact that the name was not used in terms of scoff or reproach increased the measure of its injury. It called for no reply on my part; it summoned no energy of resistance; it was, as it were, a simple recognition of certain qualities that distinguished me and made up my identity; and at last, to such an extent did it work upon my imagination that I yielded myself up to the delusion that I was all that they styled me,--an outcast and a leper! When this conviction settled down on my mind, I ceased to fret as before, but a gloomy depression gained possession of me, uncheered save by the one hope that my life should not be entirely spent among my present associates, and that I should yet be known as something else than "The Lépero." The prairie over which we travelled never varied in aspect save with the changing hours of the day. The same dreary swell, the same yellowish grass, the same scathed and scorched cedars, the same hazy outlines of distant mountains that we saw yesterday, rose before us again to-day, as we knew they would on the morrow,--till at last our minds took the reflection of the scene, and we journeyed along, weary, silent, and footsore. It was curious enough to mark how this depression exhibited itself upon different nationalities. The Saxon became silent and thoughtful, with only a slight dash of more than ordinary care upon his features, the Italian grew peevish and irritable, the Spaniard was careless and neglectful, while the Frenchman became downright vicious in the wayward excesses of his spiteful humor. Upon the half-breeds, two of whom were our guides, no change was ever perceptible. Too long accustomed to the life of the prairie to feel its influence as peculiar, they plodded on, the whole faculties bent upon one fact,--the discovery of the Chihuahua trail, from which our new track was to diverge in a direction nearly due west.