The next day, Agnes and her sons read in the papers that the man died of heart disease, which the doctors thought had been aggravated by some recent excitement. The mother and son are thankful that George’s hand did not fall upon him; but George Rodney never knows that the man he “almost met,” and who dropped down before his eyes, was his own father.
[THE INDIANS OF YSLETA.]
The rich and thriving Pueblo of the Ysléta Indians is situated on the western bank of the Rio Grande del Norte, about nine miles below the little town of Albuquerque in New Mexico.
We strike southward from Albuquerque along the east bank of the river. Three miles below the town we enter on flat and uninteresting bottomland. The eye is not relieved by a dwelling, not even by a tree, for a distance of five miles. We thus come to a rancho, deserted when we last passed there, but which still gave evidence of former comfort. The owner had joined the Texan Confederates, and quitted the territory.
Now we begin to cross the Sand Hills—a not unexciting performance. The road is a narrow and shifting one, growing daily narrower and of steeper slope, as the winds blow the sand upon it and fill it up. The wagon moves along slowly at an angle of 45°. The road winds tortuously along the face of the Sand Hills for about two miles, sometimes making short and abrupt turns. It is from two to three hundred feet above the river which washes the base of the hills. I feel an unpleasant tingling sensation at my elbows, and a great and almost uncontrollable desire to walk—“to lighten the load,” of course. Once on the road, there is no going back, and one is entirely at the mercy of one’s mules. You must let them go their own way. If they should grow restive or become frightened, a broken neck, a general and irretrievable “smash up,” an unpleasant and unrecorded grave in the quicksands of the Rio Grande, would be the result. A six-mule wagon went off at one of the sharp turns some years ago. Its fate was discovered by persons who travelled some hours behind it, and who noticed the tracks. The wagon and team had been engulfed, and had entirely disappeared before they arrived.
From the Sand Hills, we have a beautiful view of the Pueblo of Ysléta on the opposite side of the river. The spectacle of the Indians fording the river in certain spots, and driving their burros up the steep sides of the Sand Hill on which their Pueblo is built, enhances the picturesqueness of the scene.
We have passed the Sand Hills, and now we cross the river to visit the Pueblo. We have struck a little above the ford, however; the water is in the bed of our wagon. We have to stand on the seats in order to keep dry, and we perceive, not without alarm, that the mules are swimming. By striking down-stream a little, however, the mules find bottom again, and pull us out all safe on the western bank.
A steep and narrow path leads up to the summit of the Sand Hill on which the Pueblo is perched. The Pueblos always have built and still build their dwellings on the hill-tops: for defensive reasons in the olden times, for security against inundations in the present. The houses are built of the customary adobe. They are washed outside with a whitish wash which resists the action of the weather; the mode of its preparation is said to be known only to the Pueblos. I have seen nothing like it in any of the Mexican towns. The houses are generally two stories high, the lower story projecting considerably beyond the upper. The entrance is through the roof, to which you climb by a ladder placed against the outside. This mode of entrance is also a relic of defensive precaution in past times of hostilities with other tribes of Indians and with the Spanish invaders. The internal arrangement of the houses is the reverse of ours. The kitchen is in the upper story, and the sitting or sleeping room in the lower. You descend into the latter from the former by an opening in the floor so small that not even the lightest weight of the Fat Man’s Club could hope to squeeze through. The Pueblos have no monstrous developments of adipose tissue; the opening is large enough for them. The lower room is thoroughly secured even against ventilation. The only window consists of one piece of glass, without frame, imbedded in the wall.