With my first glance at the encampment, it had seemed to me too open to surprise.  The adjacent forest-clad point crept up near the left flank, offering an effectual screen to an attacking party, and the overlooking sentinel at the guard-house did not have a range of vision to the rear of more than fifty yards.  He was not on the summit of the ridge by at least half that distance, and walked along the side of the guard-house next the cabins.  He could see nothing of the surface of the valley to the west of the ridge, and when passing along the front of the building, as he paced backward and forward, he saw nothing to the rear of his beat.

I expressed my opinion of the situation to the volunteer captain, but he replied, “Pshaw! you might as well take the sentinel off, for all the good he does as a lookout for Indians.”

“Have you seen none?”

“Not a solitary moccasin, except an occasional Pueblo, since I’ve been here—­eleven months.”

“I suppose you have scouted the country thoroughly?”

“There isn’t a trail within thirty miles that I do not know.  These bundles of wolf-skins and other pelts you see going into the wagons are pretty good evidence that my men know the country.”

We walked to the kitchen, and found, hanging on the walls of the store-room, a dozen quarters of venison, the fat carcass of a bear, and several bunches of fowl.

“We are not obliged to kill our cattle to supply the men with meat,” added the captain.  “We butcher only when we need a change from wild meat.”

“I saw from the edge of the valley where I entered it that you have deer.”

“Pretty much everything but buffalo is here.”

“I hear your brook is full of fish.”

“There’s where you make a mistake,” he replied.  “There is not a fish in this valley.  The water is spring water, and must possess some mineral property distasteful to trout, for they never run up here.  In San Antonio Valley, six miles to the west, in a brook less clear than this, you can catch them by the cart-load.”

“I suppose you intend to take this venison with you?”

“Not if you will accept the gift of all but a few quarters, which we will take for friends in the city.”

“Thank you and your men.  It will be a treat to us, and keep us going until we can put in a hunt on our own account.”

We went back to the parade, and stood looking at the surrounding mountains in the deepening twilight.

“What other ways are there in and out of the valley, besides the one which we entered?” I asked.

“Well, on the east and south sides there is a trail between the peaks, four in all, and one good bridle-path to the Pueblo of Jemez.  That descends from the valley level to the Jemez River bottom, a drop of nearly three thousand feet, in a distance of three miles, zigzagging twice that distance.”

“And to the west and north?”