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Show 238 WESTERN WILDS. perature was about 70 ; but it was grateful enough to us. The driver drank two quart cups of it in ten minutes, and the poor animals crowded down the only accessible place, and shoved each other into the stream in their eagerness to get at the dirty fluid. Fortunately the dirt which gives it color is so fine that one can not feel it grit in his teeth, and aside from the earthy taste, the water is not disagree-able. The valley of the Puerco, some two miles wide, is very fertile, and the Mexicans had attempted to settle it; but no plan could be de-vised to secure enough water and their settlement was abandoned. We spread our blankets in one of their vacant houses, and slept sweetly till 2 A. M., then took to the road to pass the next desert before noon. All that was yesterday so drear has a fascinating beauty by moonlight. The turbid Puerco looks like a band of molten silver; the sand glitters with pearls, the red and yellow rocks are glorified in the brilliant light. The stream had fallen two feet during the night, from which the soldier inferred it would be dry in a day or two. Thence we rise again to another desert, and in ten miles reach the ancient border of the Navajoes ( or Navahoes, if spelled as pro-nounced), a series of rugged gulches and narrow cafions, bounded by perpendicular walls of yellow soapstone. They run from north to south, and form a break in the road something near a mile wide, evidently the bed of a long extinct river. Wash gravel and marine shells are heaped in fantastic, piles by the wind. The deepest gulch is known as Dead Man's Canon, where are buried twenty whites mas-sacred many years ago by the Navajoes. We saw our first specimens of this tribe at Albuquerque: one chief and eleven warriors, who had been into the Comanche country on a fighting and stock- stealing expedition. They got no horses, but had three men wounded, and were making their way homeward with only such provisions as they could get in the Mexican settlements. The sole ranchero at the cafion told us they had passed there on Sunday, having made the forty- four miles on foot in a little over one day. Our early start avoided the midday heat upon the desert, but the dry-ing air produced strange effects. My nose, lips, and wrists, which blistered yesterday, peeled to- day, and I started to grow a new cuticle on those members. My nose was coloring like a new meerschaum, forming a very striking feature of my countenance. How convenient if a man could sprout new members in place of the lost, as a lobster does his claw, or a bee his sting. But if the evolution philosophy be sound, we only need to feel the want of such a faculty, and ardently |