The two former officers had married in Detroit, and both Mrs. Van Vliet and Mrs. Seyburn did honor to the beautiful city of Michigan, for they were most agreeable and clever women, and presided over their army homes with distinguished grace and hospitality.
The Americans who lived there were all professional people; mostly lawyers, and a few bankers. I could not understand why so many Eastern lawyers lived there. I afterwards learned that the old Spanish land grants had given rise to illimitable and never-ending litigation.
Every morning we rode across country. There were no fences, but the wide irrigation ditches gave us a plenty of excitement, and the riding was glorious. I had no occasion yet to realize that we had left the line of the army.
A camping trip to the head-waters of the Pecos, where we caught speckled trout in great abundance in the foaming riffles and shallow pools of this rushing mountain stream, remaining in camp a week under the spreading boughs of the mighty pines, added to the variety and delights of our life there.
With such an existence as this, good health and diversion, the time passed rapidly by.
It was against the law now for soldiers to marry; the old days of "laundresses" had passed away. But the trombone player of the Tenth Infantry band (a young Boston boy) had married a wife, and now a baby had come to them. They could get no quarters, so we took the family in, and, as the wife was an excellent cook, we were able to give many small dinners. The walls of the house being three feet thick, we were never troubled by the trombone practice or the infant's cries. And many a delightful evening we had around the board, with Father de Fourri, Rev. Mr. Meany (the Anglican clergyman), the officers and ladies of the Tenth, Governor and Mrs. Prince, and the brilliant lawyer folk of Santa Fe.
Such an ideal life cannot last long; this existence of ours does not seem to be contrived on those lines. At the end of a year, orders came for Texas, and perhaps it was well that orders came, or we might be in Santa Fe to-day, wrapt in a dream of past ages; for the city of the Holy Faith had bound us with invisible chains.
With our departure from Santa Fe, all picturesqueness came to an end in our army life. Ever after that, we had really good houses to live in, which had all modern arrangements; we had beautiful, well-kept lawns and gardens, the same sort of domestic service that civilians have, and lived almost the same life.