My heart beat high.  I never for a moment doubted the desperate character of the men, and in this I think I showed good judgment; for what honest horsemen would have left the Ridge Road, or if any honest purpose had drawn them away, what honest men would have forced their horses to wade in the channel of a swollen stream in the middle of the night?  They must have been trying to travel without leaving tracks, just as I had done.  Their talk showed them to be bad characters, and their fox-like actions proved the case against them.  So I crawled forward believing fully that I should be in danger if they once found out that I had uncovered their lurking-place.  I carefully kept from making any thrashing or swishing of boughs, any crackling of twigs, or from walking with a heavy footfall; and I wondered more and more as I neared what I knew must be the other end of the grove, why they had not left the water and made camp.  For what other purpose had they come to this patch of woods?

At last I heard the stamping of horses, and I lay still for a while and peered all about me for signs of the animals or their possessors.  I moved slowly, then, so as to bring first this open space in line with my eyes, and then that, until, crawling like a lizard, I found my men.  They were lying on the ground, wrapped in blankets, all asleep, very near the other end of the grove.  In the last open spot of the timber, screened from view from the prairie by clumps of willows and other bushes, were six horses, picketed for grazing.  There were two grays, a black, two bays and a chestnut sorrel—­the latter clearly a race-horse.  They were all good horses.  There were rifles leaning against the trees within reach of the sleeping men; and from under the coat which one of them was using for a pillow there stuck out the butt of a navy revolver.

Something—­perhaps it was that consciousness which horses have of the approach of other beings, scent, hearing, or a sense of their own which we can not understand—­made the chestnut race-horse lift his head and nicker.  One of the men rose silently to a sitting posture, and reached for his rifle.  For a moment he seemed to be looking right at me; but his eyes passed on, and he carefully examined every bit of foliage and every ant-hill and grass-mound, and all the time he strained his ears for sounds.  I held my breath.  At last he lay down again; but in a few minutes he got up, and woke the others.

This was my first sight of Bowie Bushyager.  Everybody in Monterey County, and lots of other people will remember what the name of Bowie Bushyager once meant; but it meant very little more than that of his brother, Pitt Bushyager, who got up, grumbling and cursing when Bowie shook him awake.  Bowie was say twenty-eight then, and a fine specimen of a man in build and size.  He was six feet high, had a black beard which curled about his face, and except for his complexion, which was almost that of an Indian, his dead-black eye into which you could see no farther than into a bullet, and for the pitting of his face by smallpox, he would have been handsome.