Their life in the field was as near to nature, and, as far as comforts were concerned, to the beasts of the field, as men often come. A tramp in the Eastern States lives like a respectable householder in comparison. Suppose, to better understand it, that you were ordered to leave your house or flat or hall bedroom and live in the open air for two months, and that you were limited in your selection of what you wished to carry with you to the weight of eighty pounds. You would find it difficult to adjust this eighty pounds in such a way that it would include any comforts; certainly, there would be no luxuries. The soldiers of Troop G, besides the things before enumerated, were given for a day’s rations a piece of bacon as large as your hand, as much coffee as would fill three large cups, and enough flour to make five or six heavy biscuits, which they justly called “’dobes,” after the clay bricks of which Mexican adobe houses are made. In camp they received potatoes and beans. All of these things were of excellent quality and were quite satisfying, as the work supplies an appetite to meet them. This is not furnished by the Government, and costs it nothing, but it is about the best article in the line of sustenance that the soldier receives. He sleeps on a blanket with his “bunkie,” and with his “bunkie’s” blanket over him. If he is cold, he can build the fire higher, and doze in front of that. He rides, as a rule, from seven in the morning to five in the afternoon, without a halt for a noonday meal, and he generally gets to sleep by eight or nine. The rest of the time he is in the saddle. Each man carries a frying-pan about as large as a plate, with an iron handle, which folds over and is locked in between the pan and another iron plate that closes upon it. He does his own cooking in this, unless he happens to be the captain’s “striker,” when he has double duty. He is so equipped and so taught that he is an entirely independent organization in himself, and he and his horse eat and sleep and work as a unit, and are as much and as little to the rest of the troop as one musket and bayonet are to the line of them when a company salutes. [Illustration: THE MEXICAN GUIDE] We had for a guide one of the most picturesque ruffians I ever met. He was a Mexican murderer to the third or fourth degree, as Captain Hardie explained when I first met him, and had been liberated from a jail in Mexico in order that he might serve his country on this side of the river as a guide, and that his wonderful powers as a trailer might not be wasted.