Passing on through the town toward the hills and crossing the river, one discovers a sign board, upon which it is announced that the distance to the hot springs is three-quarters of a mile. Putting confidence in this announcement, the visitor cheerfully advances along a good wagon road, which soon begins to twine and twist among the hills, at times making a grade of thirty degrees. Finally, just as one begins to lose faith in the guide board, the trail, with an abrupt turn to the right, descends into a gulch, and rises steeply on the other side. Clambering up this steep, the visitor sees to the left the hotel buildings, which announce the presence of the springs, while to the right are pitched a number of tents, late sleeping rooms for an army of summer visitors which, vanquished by cold breezes, has broken camp and fled.
After a bath in the conventional zinc contrivance, to which was admitted hot and cold water through most unpoetic and sternly practical faucets, all of which suggested “modern improvements” rather than a wonderful natural phenomenon, I went out in search of the hot springs, quite as much to re-establish a somewhat shaken faith in their existence as for any other purpose. My doubts soon dissolved, for back of the hotel and half-way up the grade of a steep hill, I came upon a little rivulet of soda water still steaming with the heat of its parent spring. A little further on I saw a white tumulus of volcanic formation, and scattered over its summit oval openings in which boiled and bubbled water fresh from Pluto’s kitchen. In some of these springs the water was scalding hot, while in others it was merely lukewarm. Springs showing such radical differences of temperature were frequently not more than two feet apart. There are over fifty of these springs here, and no two of them precisely alike.
The Springs have lately passed from their former ownership into the hands of new men, who are very enterprising. Larger buildings have been erected, and the camp-like freedom of the place has been exchanged for something more nearly approaching ordinary hotel life. There is room for about 150 guests, and every requirement for the comfort of invalids. The advertisements issued by the proprietors dwell largely upon the similarity of these waters to those of the Arkansas Hot Springs, and recommend them as equally curative in the special ailments that have long made the Arkansas waters famous.
A few miles northward of Poncho Springs there is a cluster of mining villages, of which the chief are Maysville and Monarch. They lie well under the shadow of the mountains, and silver ore is produced steadily in considerable quantity. These towns communicate with the outside world by a branch line of railway which diverges at this point.
In the quiet of the evening, at this charming retreat—for we had few pleasanter halting places—the Madame bethought herself (seeing the rest of us pen and pencil in hand) that she owed a letter to her Eastern confidante, and also remembered that she had promised her an account of our youthful chef, with whom by this time we all felt tolerably well acquainted. Happy accident brought this letter under my eye and I seized the opportunity to copy it, so here it is, or at least so much of it as relates to the boy:
“My dear Mrs. McAngle:
“I must tell you about our cook; or, as my husband would, no doubt correct me, our porter. How our first boy fought and bled and died I wrote you before, and that the last I saw of him he was being bundled rheumatically aboard the homeward train. Well, after I had finished that visit at Pueblo San Juan with old Santiago’s wife, whom I described to you, I went home—that is, you know, back to our train—just at evening. As I opened the door a bright-faced boy rose to meet me, with a pair of the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen,—just the kind of orbs young ladies waste oceans of sentiment upon, you know, in boarding-school days. He was, so he told me, a mixture of Kentuckian and Canadian Indian blood. His grandmother, the only one of his family to whom he seemed to feel any allegiance, had set him up in business as a liquor seller. ‘But,’ he said, ‘the business was too rough for me, so I gave it up to a friend and came out West.’
“He proved the direct opposite of his predecessor. While Edward could cook, Burt could not; and while Edward had an abhorrence of water, Burt was never so happy as when his pots, pans and kettles were all before him and he was busy scouring. The only difficulty was, that he could not keep clean, but was for ever ‘clarin’ up,’ during which process it required considerable ingenuity to make one’s way through the débris of the kitchen furniture.
“It was not long before the inside of his car was covered with tin-ware of all descriptions, pails, smoothing irons, pokers, tools,—everything that could by any possibility be hung up. He had a passion for driving nails, the larger the more fun apparently, for his nails mostly went clear through the car-walls, which soon came to bristle like a newly furnished pin-cushion.
“With an eye to our future interests in all possible contingencies, Burt laid hold of anything along the road that he thought might be of use to us, entirely ignoring any proprietary rights which others might think they had in the object ‘smoudged,’ as he expressed it. In this way we gradually became possessed of an endless quantity of odds and ends, which it required a decided exercise of authority to get rid of.