Governor Davis had given El Paso a new District Judge, S. B. Newcomb, and a new District Attorney, J. P. Hague, neither of whom had ever been heard of on the frontier. These and two adventurers asked permission to join our party, which was granted, and these four “tenderfeet” made the journey with us in a wagon drawn by two little mules. Our ideas as to traveling over the plains were so different that we sometimes separated for a day or night. They fondly believed that a “station” was a place where warm meals and clean beds and forage for animals were to be had, and their greatest anxiety was to “get in.” We depended upon our mess chest for ourselves, and grassy camps for our animals, and fared much better.
Much depends upon selecting a good camp, and some of ours were very pleasant, and even beautiful, so that we had the appearance of a picnic party. I remember that sometimes we have made a long drive in order to reach some remembered nook where we had spent a night on former journeys, and we would drive into it with a feeling akin to coming home.
We reached the Pecos river at Horsehead crossing (where I had camped twelve years earlier with the Boundary Commission) at daybreak one morning. The river was swollen and the crossing dangerous. I first sent a man across on horseback, and then placing my wife and child in the ambulance I mounted the box and drove through the torrent, _leading the way for the four adult male tenderfeet_. Their cries to us when we had reached the western bank, “We can make it,” “We can make it,” were intended to cheer us, but really it was not a matter of the greatest importance to us whether they “made it” or not; and, could we have foreseen the future we might have felt still more indifferent. It is but fair to state that, later on Mr. Hayne forsook my enemies and became my friend and remained so till his death.
And now, arrived at my home, came the most trying days of my life. Up to this time the malignity of my enemies could affect only myself, but now my wife and child must suffer also. There were never more than a dozen of these enemies. They were composed of men of both political parties, each of whom aspired to be the political leader of El Paso. They were in full accord only in one aim—the political and personal ruin of W. W. Mills. The Republicans reasoned thus: “We cannot _lead_ the Republican party until we down Mills.” The Democrats reasoned thus: “We cannot _defeat_ the Republican party until we down Mills!” They called themselves the “Anti-Mills Party.”