sun shone from an unclouded sky
of the most brilliant blue, the air was dry and bracing in the daytime,
and crisp with the promises of frost at night. It was glorious weather;
and, under its influence, the second division ran a line of a hundred
miles down the river in ten days. As the entire party had looked forward
with eager anticipations to visiting Santa Fe, which is not on the Rio
Grande, but some distance to the east of it, they were greatly
disappointed to be met by a messenger from General Lyle, with orders for
Mr. Hobart to come into that place, while his party continued their line
south to Albuquerque, eighty miles beyond where they were.

Glen was intensely disappointed at this, for Santa Fe was one of the
places he had been most anxious to visit. His disappointment was doubled
when Mr. Hobart said that he must take somebody with him as private
secretary, and intimated that his choice would have fallen on the young
front flagman if he had only learned to talk Spanish. As it was, Binney
Gibbs was chosen for the envied position; for, though he, like the rest,
had only been for a short time among Mexicans, he was already able to
speak their language with comparative ease.

"I don't see how you learned it so quickly," said Glen, one day, when,
after he had striven in vain to make a native understand that he wished
to purchase some fruit, Binney had stepped up and explained matters with
a few words of Spanish.

"Why, it is easy enough," replied Binney, "to anybody who understands
Latin."

Then Glen wished that he, too, understood Latin, as he might easily have
done as well as his comrade. He wished it ten times more though, when,
on account of it, Binney rode gayly off to Santa Fe with Mr. Hobart,
while he went out to work on the line.

Chapter XXXIII.

IN THE VALLEY OF THE RIO GRANDE.

Near the close of a mellow autumn day Glen and "Billy" Brackett sat on a
fragment of broken wall and gazed with interest on the scene about them.
On one side, crowning a low bluff that overlooked the Rio Grande twelve
miles below Albuquerque, was the Indian pueblo of Isletta, a picturesque
collection of adobe buildings and stockaded corrals, containing some
eight hundred inhabitants. On the other side were extensive vineyards;
beyond them were vast plains, from which flocks of bleating sheep were
being driven in for the night by Indian boys; and still beyond rose the
blue range of the Sierra Madre. The air was so