Our return was like entering a house of mourning.  Miss Jean barely greeted Deweese and myself, while Uncle Lance paced the gallery without making a single inquiry as to what had become of the horse herd.  On the mistress’s orders, servants set out a cold luncheon, and disappeared, as if in the presence of death, without a word of greeting.  Ever thoughtful, Miss Jean added several little delicacies to our plain meal, and, seating herself at the table with us, gave us a clear outline of the situation.  In seventy odd miles of the meanderings of the river across our range, there was not a pool to the mile with water enough for a hundred cattle.  The wells were gradually becoming weaker, yielding less water every week, while of four new ones which were commenced before our departure, two were dry and worthless.  The vaqueros were then skinning on an average forty dead cattle a day, fully a half of which were in the Las Palomas brand.  Sympathetically as a sister could, she accounted for her brother’s lack of interest in our return by his anxiety and years, and she cautioned us to let no evil report reach his ears, as this drouth had unnerved him.

Deweese at once resumed his position on the ranch, and the next morning the ranchero held a short council with him, authorizing him to spare no expense to save the cattle.  Deweese returned the borrowed horses by Enrique, and sent a letter to the merchant at the ferry, directing him to secure and send at least twenty men to Las Palomas.  The first day after our return, we rode the mills and the river.  Convinced that to sink other wells on the mesas would be fruitless, the foreman decided to dig a number of shallow ones in the bed of the river, in the hope of catching seepage water.  Accordingly the next morning, I was sent with a commissary wagon and seven men to the mouth of the Ganso, with instructions to begin sinking wells about two miles apart.  Taking with us such tools as we needed, we commenced our first well at the confluence of the Ganso with the Nueces, and a second one above.  From timber along the river we cut the necessary temporary curbing, and put it in place as the wells were sunk.  On the third day both wells became so wet as to impede our work, and on our foreman riding by, he ordered them curbed to the bottom and a tripod set up over them on which to rig a rope and pulley.  The next morning troughs and rigging, with a remuda of horses and a watering crew of four strange vaqueros, arrived.  The wells were only about twenty feet deep; but by drawing the water as fast as the seepage accumulated, each was capable of watering several hundred head of cattle daily.  By this time Deweese had secured ample help, and started a second crew of well diggers opposite the ranch, who worked down the river while my crew followed some fifteen miles above.  By the end of the month of May, we had some twenty temporary wells in operation, and these, in addition to what water the pools afforded, relieved the situation to some extent, though the ravages of death by thirst went on apace among the weaker cattle.