I had put on heaviest flannels in the morning; and now donned in addition a cowboy slicker and was cold—this in a land where the Easterner thinks you can sizzle eggs by laying them on the sand. An old Mexican jumps into the front seat with the driver near a deserted mining camp, and the two sing snatches of Spanish songs as we ascend the cañon. Promptly at twelve, Tomaso turns back and asks me the time. When I say it is dinner, he digs out of his box a paper of soda biscuits and asks me to "have a crack." To reciprocate that kindness, I loan him my collapsible drinking cup to go down to the cañon for some water. Tomaso's courtesy is not to be outdone. After using, he dries that cup off with an ancient bandana, which I am quite sure has been used for ten years; but fortunately he does not offer me a drink.
Winsor's Ranch marks the end of the wagon road up the cañon. From this point, travel must be on foot or horseback; and though the snow peaks seem to wall in the north, they are really fifteen miles away with a dozen cañons heavily forested like fields of wheat between you and them. In fact, if you followed up any of these side cañons, you would find them, too, dotted with ranch houses; but beyond them, upper reaches yet untrod.
Up to the right, above a grove of white aspens straight and slender as a bamboo forest, is a rounded, almost bare lookout peak 10,000 feet high known as Grass Mountain. We zigzag up the lazy switchback trail, past the ranger's log cabin, past a hunting lodge of some Texas club, through the fenced ranch fields of some New York health seekers come to this 10,000 feet altitude horse ranching; and that brings up another important feature of the "tent dwellers" in New Mexico. There is nothing worse for the consumptive than idle time to brood over his own depression. If he can combine outdoor sleeping and outdoor living and twelve hours of sunshine in a climate of pure ozone with an easy occupation, conditions are almost ideal for recovery; and that is what thousands are doing—combining light farming, ranching, or fruit growing with the search for health. We passed the invalid's camp chair on this ranch where "broncho breaking" had been in progress.
Grass Mountain is used as a lookout station for fires on the Upper Pecos. The world literally lies at your feet. You have all the exaltation of the mountain climber without the travail and labor; for the rangers have cut an easy trail up the ridge; and you stand with the snow wall of the peaks on your north, the crumpled, purpling masses of the Santa Fe Range across the Pecos Cañon, and the whole Pecos Valley below you. Not a fire can start up for a hundred miles but the mushroom cone of smoke is visible from Grass Mountain and the rangers spur to the work of putting the fire out. Though thousands of outsiders camp and hunt in Pecos Cañon every year, not $50 loss has occurred through fire; and the fire patrol costs less than $47 a year. The "why" of this compared to the fire-swept regions of Idaho is simply a matter of trails. The rangers have cut five or six hundred miles of trails all through the Pecos, along which they can spur at breakneck speed to put out fires. In Idaho and Washington, thanks to the petty spites of local congressmen and senators, the Service has been so crippled by lack of funds that fewer trails have been cut through that heavy Northwest timber; and men cannot get out on the ground soon enough to stop the fire while it is small. So harshly has the small-minded policy of penuriousness reacted on the Service in the Northwest that last year the rangers had to take up a subscription among themselves to bury the men who perished fighting fire. Pecos Service, too, had its struggle against spite and incendiarism in the old days; but that is a story long past; and to-day, Pecos stands as an example of what good trail making will do to prevent fires.
We walked across the almost flat table of Grass Mountain and looked down the east side into the Las Vegas Cañon. Four feet of snow still clung to the east side of Grass Mountain, almost a straight precipice; and across the forested valley lay another ten or twelve feet of snow on the upper peaks of the Sangre de Christo Range. A pretty legend clings to that Sangre de Christo Range; and because people repeat the foolish statement that America's mountains lack legend and lore, I shall repeat it, though it is so very old. The holy padre was jogging along on his mule one night leading his little pack burro behind, but so deeply lost in his vesper thoughts that he forgot time and place. Suddenly, the mule stopped midway in the trail. The holy father looked up suddenly from his book of devotions. The rose-tinted afterglow of an Alpine sunset lay on the glistening snows of the great silent range. He muttered an Ave Maria; "Praise be God," he said; "for the Blood of Christ;" and as Sangre de Christo the great white ridge has been known ever since.
CHAPTER IV
THE CITY OF THE DEAD IN FRIJOLES CAÑON
I am sitting in one of the caves of the Stone Age. This is not fiction but fact. I am not speculating as to how those folk of neolithic times lived. I am writing in one of the cliff houses where they lived, sitting on the floor with my feet resting on the steps of an entrance stone stairway worn hip-deep through the volcanic rock by the moccasined tread of æons of ages. Through the cave door, looking for all the world from the outside like a pigeon box, I can see on the floor of the valley a community house of hundreds of rooms, and a sacred kiva or ceremonial chamber where gods of fire and water were invoked, and a circular stone floor where men and women danced the May-pole before Julius Cæsar was born, before—if Egyptian archæologists be correct—the dynasties of the Nile erected Pyramid and Sphinx to commemorate their own oblivion. To my right and left for miles—for twelve miles, to be correct—are thousands of such cave houses against the face of the cliff, as the one in which I now write. Boxed up by the snow-covered Jemez (Hamez) Mountains at one end, with a black basalt gash in the rock at the other end through which roars a mountain torrent and waterfalls too narrow for two men to walk abreast, with vertical walls of yellow pumice straight up and down as if leveled by a giant trowel, in this valley of the Frijoles waters once dwelt a nation, dead and gone before the Spaniards came to America, vanished leaving not the shadow of a record behind long before William the Conqueror crossed to England, contemporaneous, perhaps—for all science knows to the contrary—with that 20,000 B.C. Egyptian desert runner lying in the British Museum.