midnight before
Twice he came to a wide bottom-land green with willow and cottonwood and thick as chaparral , somewhere through the middle of which ran a river he decided must be the lower Nueces . One evening , as he stole out from a covert where he had camped , he saw the lights of a village . He tried to pass it on the left , but was unable to because the brakes of this bottom-land extended in almost to the outskirts of the village , and he had to retrace his steps and go round to the right . Wire fences and horses in pasture made this a task , so it was well after midnight before he accomplished it . He made ten miles or more then by daylight , and after that proceeded cautiously along a road which appeared to be well worn from travel . He passed several thickets where he would have halted to hide during the day but for the fact that he had to find water . He was a long while in coming to it , and then there was no thicket or clump of mesquite near the waterhole that would afford him covert .