But the bare country in its winter brown
was lone and desolate. The trail led straight ahead, and it would have
been obvious now to the most inexperienced eye that an army had passed
that way. They saw remains of camp fires, now and then the skeleton of a
horse or mule picked clean by buzzards, fragments of worn-out clothing
that had been thrown aside, and once a broken-down wagon. Two or three
times they saw little mounds of earth with rude wooden crosses stuck
upon them, to mark where some of the wounded had died and had been
buried.
They came at last to a bit of woodland growing about a spring that
seemed to gush straight up from the earth. It was really an open grove
with no underbrush, a splendid place for a camp. It was evident that
Cos's force had put it to full use, as the earth nearly everywhere had
been trodden by hundreds of feet, and the charred pieces of wood were
innumerable. The Panther made a long and critical examination of
everything.
"I'm thinkin'," he said, "that Cos stayed here three or four days. All
the signs p'int that way. He was bound by the terms we gave him at San
Antonio to go an' not fight ag'in, but he's shorely takin' his time
about it.
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