BOOK III
NEW MEXICO
CHAPTER VII AT SANTA FE
Judging the tropics in midsummer to be too tiring, I decided to postpone our journey to Panama and Mexico until autumn and winter. Balboa climbed that peak in Darien in September. That should be my month for going there. So we went, for the rest of the summer, to La Ciudad Real de Santa Fe, away in the Southern Rockies upon the borderland of Mexico. That was no small journey from Habana—two days in a fruit boat to New Orleans, then in a Gulf train to Houston and San Antonio, half across the Texan desert to a point nearer the Pacific than the Atlantic—burning El Paso where the street asphalt hisses when the water cart comes round. Then up country to Albuquerque, of which name, at least, there used to be Spanish dukes, the Dukes of Albuquerque. Then sixty miles through scrub and sand to Santa Fe which is some seven thousand feet up—about as high as Mexico City, though nothing like so verdant a place.
Here we hired a mud house, to be polite, "adobe built" from the Mexicans; three cool spacious rooms, a porch, a "corral." We bought two horses, Billy and Buckskin, to whom I must say we became much attached, so that it was a pity when the time came, after some months, to part with them. I bought my Billy from a cowboy for thirty dollars. "Shorty," who sold him to me, did not seem to think the transaction complete till sealed with a drink. He had in a saddle pocket of the horse he was riding a stout bottle of whisky, and, giving me a ferocious wink he turned his horse into a lane and poured into a little tin can a ration of what Uncle Sam forbids.
"I think he'll be a useful pony when he has had corn for a month," said I.