VI

SPYING OUT THE LAND

  City of the Holy Faith,
    In thy streets so dim with age,
  Do I read not Faith’s decay,
    But the Future’s heritage. 
                        —­LILIAN WHITING.

Day was passing and the shadows were already beginning to grow purple in the valleys, long before the golden light had left the opal-crowned peaks of the Sangre-de-Christo Mountains beyond them.

On the wide crest of a rocky ridge our wagons halted.  Behind us the long trail stretched back, past mountain height and canon wall, past barren slope and rolling green prairie, on to where the wooded ravines hem in the Missouri’s yellow floods.

Before us lay a level plain, edged round with high mesas, over which snowy-topped mountain peaks kept watch.  A sandy plain, checkered across by verdant-banded arroyos, and splotched with little clumps of trees and little fields of corn.  In the heart of it all was Santa Fe, a mere group of dust-brown adobe blocks—­silent, unsmiling, expressionless—­the city of the Spanish Mexican, centuries old and centuries primitive.

As our tired mules slackened their traces and drooped to rest after the long up-climb, Esmond Clarenden called out: 

“Come here, children.  Yonder is the end of the trail.”

We gathered eagerly about him, a picture in ourselves, maybe, in an age of picturesque things; four men, bronzed and bearded; two sturdy boys; Mat Nivers, no longer a little girl, it seemed now, with the bloom of health on her tanned cheeks, and the smile of good nature in wide gray eyes; beside her, the Indian maiden, Little Blue Flower, slim, brown, lithe of motion, brief of speech; and towering back of all, the glistening black face of the big, silent African woman.

So we stood looking out toward that northwest plain where the trail lost itself among the low adobe huts huddled together beside the glistening waters of the Santa Fe River.

Rex Krane was the first to speak.

“So that’s what we’ve come out for to see, is it?” he mused, aloud.  “That’s the precious old town that we’ve dodged Indians, and shot rattlesnakes, and sunburnt our noses, and rain-soaked our dress suits for!  That’s why we’ve pillowed our heads on the cushiony cactus and tramped through purling sands, and blistered our hands pullin’ at eider-down ropes, and strained our leg-muscles goin’ down, and busted our lungs comin’ up, and clawed along the top edge of the world with nothin’ but healthy climate between us and the bottom of the bottomless pit.  Humph!  That’s what you call Santa Fe!  ‘The city of the Holy Faith!’ Well, I need a darned lot of ‘holy faith’ to make me see any city there.  It’s just a bunch of old yellow brick-kilns to me, and I ’most wish now I’d stayed back at Independence and hunted dog-tooth violets along the Big Blue.”

“It’s not Boston, if that’s what you were looking for; at least there’s no Bunker Hill Monument nor Back Bay anywhere in sight.  But I reckon it’s the best they’ve got.  I’m tired enough to take what’s offered and keep still,” Bill Banney declared.