"PASSING ON OUR WAY THROUGH THE TOWN OF MOSBY."
Our reason for taking our way through town rather than crossing the Mosby Ridge, back of the professor's house, and going down the Mescalero valley, was that the latter course, cut up by many deep cañons, would be much the more difficult of the two; for by following down the eastern side of the ridge, as we proposed to do, we should presently come to a point where that barrier, which up near Mescalero began as a mountain range, became first a line of round-topped hills, and then, about forty miles below town, came to an end altogether in a little conical eminence known as The Foolscap. We could therefore pass round its southern end without difficulty, when we should find ourselves in the Mescalero valley at its wide part, and by heading southwestward should arrive in about another twenty miles in the neighborhood of the village of Hermanos—a route somewhat longer, but very much easier for the animals, than the other one.
About five miles below town we abandoned the road, which there turned off to the left to join the main stage-road, and continuing our southward course up and down hill over the spurs of the Mosby Ridge we made camp early in the afternoon; for our animals being as yet in rather poor condition, we thought it advisable to give them an easy day for the first one.
Selecting a sheltered nook among the pine trees, we unpacked the mule and unsaddled the ponies, and then, while Dick cooked our supper, I busied myself cutting pine boughs for our beds and chopping fire-wood. Soon after sunset we rolled ourselves in our blankets, and in spite of the novelty of the situation—for I had never before gone to bed with no roof overhead nearer than the sky—I slept soundly until Dick's voice aroused me, crying, "Roll out, old chap! Roll out! The sun will catch you in bed in a minute," when I sprang up, fresh as a daisy and hungry as a shark, as one always seems to do after sleeping out under the stars in the keen, pine-scented air of the mountains.
Continuing our journey, we presently rounded the end of the Mosby Ridge, and turning to the right saw before us the twin peaks of the Dos Hermanos, standing there, as it seemed to me, like two faithful sentinels guarding the secret of the King Philip mine.
"Now, Frank," said my companion, as we sat at supper on the little hill with which the Ridge terminated, "we have a tough day of it before us to-morrow. The valley down at this end, you see, is just a sage-brush plain; there are no cañons down here like there are at the upper end; and there is no water either, unfortunately—this side of the mountains, I mean. The streams which come down from Mescalero and the Ridge take a westerly turn and go off through a deep gorge to the north of the peaks—you can see the black shadow of it from here."
"What do the people at Hermanos do for water, then?" I asked.
"There is a little stream which comes down from the saddle between the Dos Hermanos peaks and runs eastward through the village. But it sinks into the soil soon afterward, for the country down that way becomes very sandy; it is the beginning of the Little Cactus Desert, across which the pack-trains and the soldier escort used to travel, you remember, headed for the Mosca Pass—that low place in the Santa Claras that you see down there, due south from here."