Thus he labored with the Inditos, his terrible little fatalists in combat. There were enough to choose from, since by now the tide of desertion was changing toward the Republic. The problem of mounts in time solved itself. The French began selling their horses rather than transport them back to Europe, and these being declared contraband of war by the Liberal government, were complacently taken away from their owners without even Juarez script in payment. The question of arms proved more troublesome, but the answer at last was even more satisfactory. For the besieged at Queretero, Driscoll's troop later became some unfamiliar dragon hissing an incessant flame of poisonous breath. This was due to a strange and mystical weapon which not only carried a ball farther than any rifle known before, but sixteen of them, one after the other. The strange and mystical weapon multiplied a lone man into a very genii of death, until the Missourian's twelve hundred were more to be dreaded than many battalions. The repeating rifles, it may be explained, formed a part of the cache which General Shelby had made on crossing into Mexico. He had taken them, among other things, from the Confederate depositories in Texas. Driscoll knew of the cache through Boone, and by infinite patience had it brought into Michoacan. A solitary Indito journeyed eight hundred miles unnoticed with some seeming fragments of scrap iron. Other vagos were in front of him. Others followed. And these passed yet others, empty handed, trudging in the opposite direction. So an arsenal came to the Sierra Madre del Sur all the way from the Rio Grande, and each and every cavalier, whether miserable ranchero or veteran Missourian, became an engine of destruction, good for a fusillade of forty shots without the biting of a cartridge, for sixteen from his rifle, for six from each of his revolvers, and after these, good for terrific in-fighting with his dragoon sabre. It was no marvel that Driscoll loved such a troop, but the wonder lay in his smile, soft and purring and far-away, as he stroked his murderous darling. Colonel Daniel Boone, chief of scouts, was harassed nearly to insomnia over the change in his friend. At the bottom of the mystery there must be inspiration for a glowing line, and with pen ready poised over the violet fluid of romance, it was disheartening to have the solution elude him. He proposed clues as a poet tests rhymes. There was vendetta. There was blighted passion. But he ruefully discarded both. Either would be marked by violent growth, while this thing that touched the Storm Centre formed as slowly as the gravity of wisdom. But what baffled most was that Driscoll himself was completely oblivious. If _he_ knew nothing of the effect, how then could one ask him about the cause?