The friends sicken at the delay, as weary months drag on. Sibley's Texans should be now on the Gila. They have guides, leaders, scouts, and spies from the Southern refugees pouring over the Gila. Every golden day has its gloomy sunset. Hardin's brow furrows with deep lines. His sagacity tells him that the time has passed for the movement to succeed. And he is right. Sibley wearies out the winter in Texas. The magnet of Eastern fields of glory draws the fiery Texans across the Mississippi. The Californian volunteers are arming and drilling. They stream out to Salt Lake. They send the heavy column of General Carleton toward El Paso. The two chiefs of the Golden Circle are unaware of the destination of Carleton. Loyalty has learned silence. There are no traitor department clerks here, to furnish maps, plans, and duplicate orders. Canby in New Mexico, unknown to the secessionists of California, aided by Kit Carson, gathers a force to strike Sibley in flank. It is fatal to Californian conquest. Hardin and Valois learn of the lethargy of the great Confederate army, flushed with success. Sibley's dalliance at Fort Bliss continues. The "army of New Mexico," on September 19, 1861, is only a few hundreds of mounted rangers and Texan youth under feeble Sibley. From the first, Jefferson Davis's old army jealousies and hatred of able men of individuality, hamstring the Southern cause. A narrow-minded man is Davis, the slave of inveterate prejudice. With dashing Earl Van Dorn, sturdy Ben Ewell, and dozens of veteran cavalry leaders at his service, knowing every foot of the road, he could have thrown his Confederate column into California. Three months after Sumter's fall, California should have been captured. Davis allows an old martinet to ruin the Confederate cause in the Pacific. The operation is so easy, so natural, and so necessary, that it looks like fatuity to neglect the golden months of the fall of 1861. Especially fitted for bold dashes with a daring leader, the Texans throw themselves, later, uselessly against the flaming redoubts of Corinth. They are thrown into mangled heaps before Battery Robinett, dying for the South. Their military recklessness has never been surpassed in the red record of war.