It was not too easy to obtain shelter for the night—but Ewart was taken in at a house where there was to be a wedding next day, and nobody there except he slept a wink all night long. He had hot coffee and a substantial breakfast before dawn. We were not so lucky, but we had a mattress and a floor in a room of an empty house. The horses fared best of all, being put into a cosy corral with heaps of alfalfa and corn and a grand disarray of cornhusks. Next morning we had them saddled at dawn, and rode to the fording of the river as sunrise was breaking over the mountains.
That day was a glorious one; first through the brown-leaved woods of the river shore, then up over sandbanks and crags, through copse and boscage, ever higher, to wild rocky country and vast wastes where no man lived and no cattle of any kind found pasture. The morning sun was over-swept by snow clouds, the winds hurried over mountain sides in white capes of flurrying snow. Snow blew lustily into our faces and over our horses. We rode into fast-dropping curtains of thick snow and rode through them and out of them into radiant sunlight again. There joined us on the way many Indians clad in cotton shirts and breeches and with old scarlet and orange blankets swathed about their shoulders like capes. Their polished ebony hair hung in long, rough-tied plaits from their lightly turbaned heads. I say turbaned, but the turban was no more than a gayly colored kerchief tied like a bandage around their temples.
"How!" "How!" they cried in little yelps as they drew abreast of us.
"Hello!" we replied. "Going to Jemez Dance?"
"Si, si," they answered. "You going?"
Few spoke any English, but they were delighted to have us of their company, and we went with various parties for many miles. Once there were more than twelve of us all cantering together over the vague trail, and it was a pretty sight.
"Poco frio—a little cold," was a favorite remark of ours.
"Si, mucho frio," they replied. "Not a little but very cold!"
They stopped and lit five-minute bonfires of dried weeds, just to warm their hands and bodies. Round these blazes they fairly danced. In the twilight of the late afternoon among the snow patches, these bonfire dances were most eerie in appearance.
The Indians were so cold they made their horses go faster and faster to keep warm. But as ours were more heavily burdened we kept a more moderate pace and let the Indians go ahead. We made a big pot of coffee in the afternoon and that kept warm our toes otherwise chilled in the stirrups. The Indians, on in front, had been eating melons and throwing down chunks of rind. In this rind and mouthfuls of snow, Billy and Buck took enormous pleasure, simply guzzling over them. George, however, seemed to have toothache and turned his head away.