miniature waterfalls. Wherever the canyon widens to little fields, the
Mexican farmer's adobe hut stands by the roadside with an intake ditch
to irrigate the farm. The road corkscrews up and up, in and out, round
rock flank and rampart and battlement, where the canyon forks to right
and left up other forested canyons, many of which, save for the hunter,
have never known human tread. Straight ahead north there, as you dodge
round the rocky abutments crisscrossing the stream at a dozen fords,
loom walls and domes of snow, Baldy Pecos, a great ridge of white, the
two Truchas Peaks going up in sharp summits. The road is called twenty
miles as the crow flies; but this is not a trail as the crow flies. You
are zigzagging back on your own track a dozen places; and there is no
lie as big as the length of a mile in the mountains, especially when the
wheels go over stones half their own size. Where the snow peaks rear
their summits is the head of Pecos Canyon--a sort of snow top to the
sides of a triangle, the Santa Fe Range shutting off the left on the
west, the Las Vegas or Sangre de Christo Mountains walling in the right
on the east. I know of nothing like it for grandeur in America except
the Rockies round Laggan in Canada.

[Illustration: The Pueblo of Taos, where the houses are practically
communal dwellings five stories in height]

I had put on heaviest flannels in the morning; and now donned in
addition a cowboy slicker and was cold--this in a land where the
Easterner thinks you can sizzle eggs by laying them on the sand. An old
Mexican jumps into the front seat with the driver near a deserted mining
camp, and the two sing snatches of Spanish songs as we ascend the canyon.
Promptly at twelve, Tomaso turns back and asks me the time. When I say
it is dinner, he digs out of his box a paper of soda biscuits and asks
me to "have a crack." To reciprocate that kindness, I loan him my
collapsible drinking cup to go down to the canyon for some water.
Tomaso's courtesy is not to be outdone. After using, he dries that cup
off with an ancient bandana, which I am quite sure has been used for ten
years; but fortunately he does not offer me a drink.

Winsor's Ranch marks the end of the wagon road up the canyon. From this
point, travel must be on foot or horseback; and though the snow peaks
seem to wall in the north, they are really fifteen miles away with a
dozen canyons heavily forested like fields of wheat between you and them.
In