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Show 226 WESTERN WILDS. place in the old days of freighting from the Missouri border, because it was on the first level and fertile piece of ground the trains could reach after getting through the mountain passes. But it can never be a railroad center, though it may some day have a branch road. My only companion from Santa Fe to Fort Wingate was Frank Hamilton, of the Eighth United States Cavalry, stationed at that post. Frank had been detailed to come to Santa Fe on military business, and had improved the occasion by getting gloriously drunk, in which condition he remained most of the time he was there, and was barely sober enough to know the road. His first move was down a three-foot bank into the Santa Fe. I jumped into the water to avoid a fall on the rocks, which stuck up sharply on the other side; but the wagon careened half over, lodged and righted again, when the mules took a forward surge, so I got off with nothing worse than a drench-ing. Hamilton, being drunk, and limber as a rag, of course escaped injury. For \ varrnth and dryness' sake I walked most of the afternoon. We turn south- west, rising by successive " benches " to a vast bar-ren table- land. We pass in the afternoon one Mexican hamlet, look-ing like a collection of half a dozen " green " brick- yards dry, hard, dusty and desolate. Crossing the high mesa, level as the sea, we ap-proach an irregular line of rocks, rising like turrets ten or twenty feet above the plain, which we find to be a sort of a natural battlement along the edge of the " big hill." Reaching the cliff we see, at an angle of forty- five degrees below us, in a narrow valley, the town of La Bajada. Down the face of this hill the road winds in a series of zigzags, bounded in the worst places by rocky walls, descending fif-teen hundred feet in three- quarters of a mile. La Bajada is the stere-otyped New Mexican town a collection of mud- huts, among which one or two whitewashed domos indicate the residences of persons of the genie fina ( hen- la fee- nafi), or, as they themselves style it, of the sangre azul ( blue blood). The town has a hotel, consisting of a quadrangle of rooms around an open square, which contains some flowers, two shade- trees, benches, and wash- stands. The rooms have floors of wood, instead of dirt; the walls are whitewashed; two mirrors and a buffalo- skin lounge adorn the sitting- room, and generally the place ranks high. Two bright-eyed, graceful, copper- colored senoritas bring me a supper of coffee, side meat, eggs and tortillas de mats, and entertain me with a vo-luminous account, in musical Spanish, of their personal recollections of the place. I have learned enough of the language to be able to |
