Lieutenant Saltelo brought in Sergeant Meek and Corporal Jerry Jackson,
Terry Miller, John Mountjoy, poor John Sparks and Tom Dougherty,
Baroney, Pat Smith and the few miserable horses and the main baggage.
There was great rejoicing, again, in Santa Fe.
Sergeant Meek was taken at once to Governor Alencaster, but ’twas safe
to say that the governor would find out little from _him_. Stub sought
the other men out, at the barracks. John Sparks and Tom were unable to
walk; they had lost their feet, and the most of their fingers; Baroney
and Pat, and, they said, the sergeant, too, were in bad shape, from the
march through the snows, to the stockade; but they all welcomed Stub.
“Where’s the cap’n?”
“He’s gone to Chihuahua.”
“And what are ye doin’ here, then? Did you run off from him? Say!”
“No. He told me to stay. I found my father. We’re living here――till we
can get away.”
“You did? Found your father! Want to know! Hooray! And the cap’n and
the rest to Chihuahua. So it’s to Chihuahua the same for us, no doubt.”
“Faith, that’s proper,” declared Tom Dougherty. “We’ll not desert him.
If it be prison for wan of us let it be prison for all of us. What’s
left o’ me’ll stick to the cap’n. Sure, John an’ me are only poor
cripples――whether we’ll be paid I don’t know; but all we want is to be
with him, doin’ as we can. He’s had the hardest luck an’ he complained
not wance.”
When Sergeant Meek came, Stub gave him the note. The sergeant read it.
“The cap’n says for us to keep our arms, and not lose the baggage.
Yes, that’s the caper. Bear in mind, lads. We’re for Chihuahua in the
morning.”
They, also, were sent down to Chihuahua. Stub never saw any of them
again, either. He heard, much later, that the lieutenant and six had
safely reached Natchitoches; but from Chihuahua no word ever came back
of Sergeant Meek, Corporal Jerry, Baroney the interpreter, Privates
Sparks, Dougherty, Mountjoy, Miller, and Pat Smith, except that General
Salcedo, the commander, had found them a hard lot to handle and had got
them out of his province as quickly as he might.
So probably they caught up with Lieutenant Pike somewhere in the United
States; and as likely as not some of them were with him to support
him when he fell, dying on the field of battle, away north in Canada,
during the War of 1812.
They all loved him.
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Except for the frontispiece, illustrations have been moved to
follow the text that they illustrate.
――Printer’s, punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently
corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.