Washed-out roads, arroyos, rocky stretches, and nubbly hills. We just about smashed everything, cracked and broke the exhaust, lost bolts and screws, and scraped along on the pan all of the way.
And yet the dread Bajada Hill, in which we are to drop nine hundred feet in one mile and long cars are warned in every guidebook of the sharp and precipitous turns, is still ahead of us. One thing, if it is worse than from the top of the Raton we might as well be prepared to leave all that is left of us scattered in odd pieces along the road.
The next time we motor the trail to Santa Fé we are unanimously agreed that it is going to be in a very different type of car—or best of all, on the backs of little sure-footed burros!
CHAPTER XX
OUR LITTLE SISTER OF YESTERDAY
With straight black Indian hair piled high under a lace mantilla, with necklaces of gold and silver and coral and turquoise as big as hens’ eggs, with her modern American dress barely showing under her Indian blanket of holiest red, her head pillowed against the mountains of the North, and her little pueblo feet in the high-heeled Spanish slippers stretched out upon the plains of the South, Santa Fé sits dreaming in the golden sunlight.
Sometimes she dreams idly of her girlhood when she ran about the mountains barefooted, her hair done in two squash-blossom whorls on either side of her dusky head, so long ago that no white man had ever set foot on the western continent. Or perhaps, half shutting her unfathomable eyes, she remembers the heroes who fought and died for her, or the pomp of her marriage with her Spanish first lord, Don Juan d’Onate—noble in estates rather than character, though he brought her a wedding-gift of white wooly animals, afterward called sheep, and furthermore, dressed her in fine clothes, put her in a palace, and made a lady of her. Her little bare feet were shod in scarlet slippers, and she had many skirts of silk and velvet, though never a bodice to one of them, but her breast was strung with necklaces and her arms with bracelets, and she had shawls of silk and mantillas of lace to wrap most of her face and all of her bare brown shoulders in. The palace had walls six feet thick; some say the thick walls were to hide the true palace already built by her own Indian forefathers. All the same, nobles in broadcloth embroidered in silver and gold crowded her audience room when the Island of Manhattan was a wilderness, and the wood of which the Mayflower was to be built was still growing in the forest of England.
But then the dream becomes a sad one of injustice and cruelty; of long, long miserable years under the oppression of a dissipated gambling tyrant who put her family to the sword or made them slaves. Then came revolt and savage warfare; massacres that made her palace steps run red, vivid days of flame, black ones of darkness until——And this is her dream of dreams! She forgets it all happened in the long ago. The quick blood leaps again in her veins, her heart beats fast, her pulses quiver at the magic name of her hero, her conqueror, her lover, Don Diego de Vargas! Again she sees him, surrounded by his panoplied soldiers, lances flashing, banners waving, marching victorious across the plaza, and planting his cross at her palace door in the name of the Virgin, demanding her glad surrender!
“Ah, to love was to live!” says Santa Fé. “Yet in all the world there was only one De Vargas—and he has passed!” And she wraps herself in her Indian blanket and falls again to dreaming.