Into this foreign country of five hundred square miles the eight United States cavalry troops of forty men each and two companies of infantry were sent to find Garza and his followers. The only means by which a man or horses or cows can be tracked in this desert is by the foot or hoof prints which they may leave in the sandy soil as they follow the trails already made or make fresh ones. To follow these trails it is necessary to have as a guide a man born in the brush, who has trailed cattle for a livelihood. The Mexican Government supplied the troops with some of their own people, who did not know the particular country into which they were sent, but who could follow a trail in any country. One or two of these, sometimes none, went with each troop. What our Government should have done was to supply each troop commander with five or six of these men, who could have gone out in search of trails, and reported at the camp whenever they had found a fresh one. By this means the troops could have been saved hundreds of miles of unnecessary marching and countermarching on “false alarms,” and the Government much money, as the campaign in that event would have been brought much more rapidly to a conclusion. But the troop commanders in the field had no such aids. They had to ride forth whenever so ordered to do by the authorities at headquarters, some two hundred miles from the scene of the action, who had in turn received their information from the Mexican general on the other side of the Rio Grande. This is what made doing their duty, as represented by obeying orders, such a difficult thing to the troops in the Garza territory. They knew before they saddled their horses that they were going out on a wild-goose chase to wear out their horses and their own patience, and to accomplish nothing beyond furnishing Garza’s followers with certain satisfaction in seeing a large body of men riding solemnly through a dense underbrush in a blinding sun to find a trait which a Mexican general had told an American general would be sure to lead them to Garza, and news of which had reached them a week after whoever had made the trail had passed over it. They could imagine, as they trotted in a long, dusty line through the chaparral, as conspicuous marks on the plain as a prairie-wagon, that Garza or his men were watching them from under a clump of cactus on some elevation in the desert, and that he would say: “Ah! the troops are out again, I see. Who is it to-day--Hardie, Chase, or Hunter? Lend me your field-glass. Ah! it is Hardie. He is a good rider. I hope he will not get a sunstroke.” And then they would picture how the revolutionists would continue the smoking of their cornstalk cigarettes and the drinking of the smuggled muscal.