First Cowboys and Cattle
My companion at luncheon volunteered further that he had unluckily never been farther south than Pueblo himself, but he knew a drug clerk who was the highest authority on road information. Information and ice-cream soda at the same time was a combination too alluring to be resisted, and an hour later saw me thirsting at the fountain. The soda clerk called to another out of sight behind the drug screen:
“Say, Bill, there’s a lady here wants to start for Albuquerque tomorrow. Do you know anybody that’s gone over the Raton lately?”
A long, lanky, typical “Uncle Sam,” sauntered in eating a stick of peppermint.
“Why, yes,” he drawled, “Bullard went down. I guess he went with a team though; it was about a month ago. But Tracey went last week and took his bride on their wedding-trip. Of course,” he turned to me, “Tracey is a big man. Used to work on the freight depot. He bought a good manila towline and he is as strong as an ox. He could haul his machine out of anything, I guess.”
At this point an outsider entered; he was labeled from head to toe with prosperity, expensive clothes, diamond rings—one on the third finger of each hand—a diamond scarfpin, a breezy air of “here-I-am” self-confidence. He seemed to be a friend of the drug clerk’s and he ordered a malted milk and sat on the stool next to me. Immediately the clerk who had been called “Bill” appealed to him.
“This lady is going down to New Mexico. Do you know anything about the Raton Pass?”
“Do I know anything about Raton? I was born there!” Then he laughed and turned to me: “You needn’t tell anybody though. Want to know about Raton? Well, I’ll tell you, they have no streets, and they have no drainage, and when it rains the mud is so soft you can go out in a boat and sail from house to house! There’s just a Santa Fé roundhouse and a bunch of cottages. Oh, it’s the road over the Pass you want to know about?” He stirred his baby beverage. “Well, they say they have fixed the road up some since I was down there but I guess the best thing you can do is to let your chauffeur take the automobile down, and you walk behind it with the wreath!”
But somehow these alarms no longer terrify! Are we, too, being imbued with the spirit of the West? Forgetting that our original intention was to motor only so far as we could travel comfortably, we can now think of nothing but that we have arrived merely at the gateway of the land of adventure, where cowboys, prairie schooners, and Indians may possibly still be found!
The Honorable Geoffrey G., an Englishman whom we met in New York last year, says he is going with us as far as Santa Fé. He has just imported a brand-new little foreign car and is as proud as Punch over it. It is even lower hung than ours, and has a very delicate mechanism. He drives it apparently well, but from various remarks he has made I don’t believe he knows the first thing about machinery.