"What kind of Indians were they?" asked Glen, of the Mexican, when they
had lost sight of their unpleasant acquaintances.

"Navajos," was the answer.

They were indeed a wretched band of the once wealthy and powerful tribe
who claimed that whole country as a pasture-land for their countless
flocks and herds. For many years they had been hunted and killed, their
flocks driven off and their growing crops destroyed wherever found,
until now the main body of the tribe was being slowly starved out of
existence on a small reservation in Eastern New Mexico. It was so small
that no more Indians could be crowded into it, and the miserable
remnant, who still lurked in the fastnesses of their own country,
despoiled of all means of procuring a livelihood, prowled about like so
many hungry dogs, gleaning the offal from white men's camps, and hunted
like wild beasts by all whom they were unfortunate enough to meet.

This band had probably followed Mr. Hobart's party for the sake of what
might be picked up in their abandoned camps, and had evidently regarded
the poisoned meat, discovered that very morning, as a perfect godsend.

"I reckon we'll have to manage somehow to get along without any wolves,"
said "Billy" Brackett.

"Yes," replied Glen, regretfully, "I suppose we shall."

Ten miles of line were run that day, through the solemn pine forest, and
darkness overtook the party on the very summit of the great Continental
Divide. They were crossing the Sierra Madre Mountains, through Zuni
Pass. As Glen subtracted the last reading of his rod for the day from
the last height of instrument, and found that it gave an elevation of
7925 feet, he uttered a shout. For weeks the elevations above sea-level
had been steadily mounting upward. This one was a foot lower than the
last.

"Hurrah!" he cried, "we are on the Pacific Slope."

It was hard to realize that water, on one side of where they stood,
would find its way into the Rio Grande, and so on into the Atlantic,
while that but a few feet away would flow through the Colorado into the
Pacific. The country did not look any different, but it seemed so. They
actually seemed to be breathing the air of the mighty sunset ocean, and
this one day's run seemed to place the States, and everything eastern,
farther behind them than all the rest of their journey. About the
camp-fires that evening the conversation was wholly of California and
the golden West, and they sprang to their work the