The Rangers enlist for a year under one of eight captains, and the State pays them a dollar a day and supplies them with rations and ammunition. They bring with them their own horse, blanket, and rifle, and revolver; they wear no regular uniform or badge of any sort, except the belt of cartridges around the waist. The mounted police of the gold days in the Australian bush, and the mounted constabulary of the Canadian border are perhaps the only other organizations of a like nature and with similar duties. Their headquarters are wherever their captain finds water, and, if he is fortunate, fuel and shade; but as the latter two are difficult to find in common in the five hundred square miles of brush along the Rio Grande, they are content with a tank of alkali water alone. There are about twenty men in each of the eight troops, and one or two of them are constantly riding away on detached service--to follow the trail of a Mexican bandit or a horse-thief, or to suppress a family feud. The Rangers’ camps look much like those of gypsies, with their one wagon to carry the horses’ feed, the ponies grazing at the ends of the lariats, the big Mexican saddles hung over the nearest barb fence, and the blankets covering the ground and marking the hard beds of the night before. These men are the especial pride of General Mabry, the Adjutant-general of Texas, who was with them the first time I met them, sharing their breakfast of bacon and coffee under the shade of the only tree within ten miles. He told me some very thrilling stories of their deeds and personal meetings with the desperadoes and “bad” men of the border; but when he tried to lead Captain Brooks into relating a few of his own adventures, the result was a significant and complete failure. Significant, because big men cannot tell of the big things they do as well as other people can--they are handicapped by having to leave out the best part; and because Captain Brooks’s version of the same story the general had told me, with all the necessary detail, would be: “Well, we got word they were hiding in a ranch down in Zepata County, and we went down there and took ’em--which they were afterwards hung.” The fact that he had had three fingers shot off as he “took ’em” was a detail he scorned to remember, especially as he could shoot better without these members than the rest of his men, who had only lost one or two. Boots above the knee and leather leggings, a belt three inches wide with two rows of brass-bound cartridges, and a slanting sombrero make a man appear larger than he really is; but the Rangers were the largest men I saw in Texas, the State of big men. And some of them were remarkably handsome in a sun-burned, broad-shouldered, easy, manly way. They were also somewhat shy with the strangers, listening very intently, but speaking little, and then in a slow, gentle voice; and as they spoke so seldom, they seemed to think what they had to say was too valuable to spoil by profanity.