the three horsemen; and as I happened to be close to an island, I fastened
my mustang to a branch with the lasso, and threw myself on the grass under
the trees.

This night, however, I had no fancy for tobacco. Neither the cigars nor
the _dulcissimus_ tempted me. I tried to sleep, but in vain. Once or twice
I began to doze, but was roused again by violent cramps and twitchings in
all my limbs. There is nothing more horrible than a night passed in the
way I passed that one, faint and weak, enduring torture from hunger and
thirst, striving after sleep and never finding it. I can only compare the
sensation of hunger I experienced to that of twenty pairs of pincers
tearing at my stomach.

With the first grey light of morning I got up and prepared for departure.
It was a long business, however, to get my horse ready. The saddle, which
at other times I could throw upon his back with two fingers, now seemed
made of lead, and it was as much as I could do to lift it. I had still
more difficulty to draw the girths tight; but at last I accomplished this,
and scrambling upon my beast, rode off. Luckily my mustang's spirit was
pretty well taken out of him by the last two days' work; for if he had
been fresh, the smallest spring on one side would have sufficed to throw
me out of the saddle. As it was, I sat upon him like an automaton, hanging
forward over his neck, some times grasping the mane, and almost unable to
use either rein or spur.

I had ridden on for some hours in this helpless manner, when I came to a
place where the three horsemen whose track I was following had apparently
made a halt, perhaps passed the previous night. The grass was trampled and
beaten down in a circumference of some fifty or sixty feet, and there was
a confusion in the horse tracks as if they had ridden backwards and