“Sure did!” chuckled the Colonel. “There was a good story going around his regiment that they tell on Big John, boys. It seems they were in the middle of a charge, when someone yelled out—‘Hey—Big John!—shake off your bayonet—there’s three Boches dangling on it!’”
“Reminds me of a dare-devil I had in my battery,” grinned Sid. “That fellow, a big, red-haired Maine man, was afraid of nothing! During our Argonne advance we had a battery assignment with one gun to go right under a tree. The Boches had left a bomb there dangling from a branch by a rope, so that if you took it down it would surely go off. Up comes Mike, as we all stood looking at it, figuring out how to get rid of the thing. ‘Lave me at ut!’ says he, brushing the rest aside, and before I could yell out a word he had ripped it loose—every one scattering right and left—and then he hurled it,—and the thing went off in mid-air and liked to have blown down our tree!”
“Great times you boys must have had!” sighed the Colonel, “but fighting was not so damn devilish in my day. Glad it’s all over, and we can get back to the clean joys of hunting again! We’ll get our hats in Albuquerque—wait till you see ’em! A big Mex. sombrero, with a sugar-loaf crown and a brim a yard wide—unless things have changed from my old Apache days. And they don’t change, much, down there. New Mexico’s still half Spanish.”
The boys realized that when, two weeks later, their transcontinental bade good-by to Colorado at Spanish Peaks and dropped down the old Santa Fe trail into New Mexico. Mesas, Indian pueblos still inhabited, and little Mexican ’dobe villages greeted them on every hand, keeping the boys continually crossing to opposite windows of their Pullman to stare out. This was not the old U. S. at all! It just couldn’t be! As the train climbed the grade toward Arizona, the country grew wilder and more desolate. Navaho and Zuni Indians came down to the stations to trade baskets and pottery; the pueblo of Laguna rose close at hand; the high rock of Acoma, whose pueblo has defied the conqueror for centuries, was to be seen, dim and misty, down a bare valley. They saw a great natural bridge carved by water out of the solid cliff, and then, high above, the train passed those remarkable carved and pinnacled buttes called Navaho Church, as the tracks dipped down-grade again, to follow the winding valley of the Puercos into Arizona. Bare and desolate and empty and dry was that stream bed, with frightful bad lands rising across the river to the rim of a high plateau, fringed with scraggy timber.
Shortly after dinner of that last day, the train slowed down to stop at a little water tank station. Hinchman’s Ranch could be reached, forty-five miles north from here. The boys searched avidly the little flat, back of the station, with eager eyes. It seemed a mile or so wide and was backed by rock-ribbed bad lands that ascended to the plateau. Whirling clouds of red dust, each the storm center of a cowboy on a cayuse, smoked through the sparse greasewood that dotted the plain, banging out a welcome with fanning revolvers. Alongside the track they spied Big John, mounted on a restive white wild mustang that had evidently only recently been “gentled,” for he seemed inclined to hop right over their locomotive. With him were two saddled ponies, evidently for them, and a big roan horse for the Colonel. Barking at the train was the largest and boniest hound the boys had ever seen.
“That must be Ruler, Les—and there’s Big John with the horses—Gee—roo! I want to yell!—Can’t we get this window open?” cried Sid excitedly.
“C’mon, boys, grab your rifles and let’s vamoose,” called the Colonel, hustling out of the smoking compartment with the stump of a black cigar smoldering under his white mustache. “Here, Sambo, fall on this duffel, boy.”
They tumbled out of the vestibule and the Colonel, after a hearty handshake with Big John, hurried forward to see about their crate of dogs in the baggage car.
“Hi, Sergeant Sid!—Gosh-all, but you do look nat’ral!” yelled Big John from the white horse, as Sid rushed across the cinder platform of the station. “Down, Ruler, down!—you ol’ pisen houn’ dawg!” he roared.—“An’ dam’f thar ain’t that ornery little shavetail Looie, Scotty! Put ’er here, you li’l rooster!—Put ’er here!” chortled Big John, leaning far out of his saddle as the white horse braced against his weight on the stirrup.
The boys fell all over one another shaking Big John’s huge paw. Except for a frightful shrapnel scar that seamed his face, he had not changed much since Montana days. The same big hawk nose, the same piercing black eyes and long, twirling mustache, the same intense black hair, under—yes,—the same old Stetson that he had worn in the Rockies! Evidently the giant Montanan scorned the “greaser” hat of the Southwest.