alternating canon and mesa, much of the
journey over trails deadly dangerous for any creature less sure-footed
than a goat, was no more than a pleasant _pasear_. Thus it was barely
high noon of the third day when the thirty Cross Canonites reached
their destination.

Deep down in a mighty gorge, nestled beside the stream that gave its
name alike to canon and to town, Mancos stewed contentedly in a
temperature that would try the strength and temper of any unaccustomed
to the climate of southwestern Colorado. Framed in Franciscan-gray
sage brush, itself gray as the sage with the dust of pounding hoofs and
rushing whirlwinds, at a little distance Mancos looked like an
aggregation of dead ash heaps, save where, here and there, dabs of
faded paint lent a semblance of patches of dying embers.

While raw, uninviting, and even melancholy in its every aspect, for the
scattered denizens of a vast region round about Mancos's principal
street was the local Great White Way that furnished all the fun and
frolic most of them ever knew. To it flocked miners from their dusky,
pine-clad gorges in the north, grangers from the then new farming
settlement in the Montezuma Valley, cowboys from Blue Mountain, the
Dolores, and the San Juan; Navajos from Chillili, Utes from their
reservation--a motley lot burning with untamed elemental passions that
called for pleasure "straight."

Joyously descending upon the town at a breakneck lope before a
following high wind that completely shrouded them in clouds of dust, it
was not until they pulled up before their favorite feed corral that the
outfit learned that Mancos was revelling in quite the reddest
red-letter day of its existence, the day of its first visitation by a
circus--and also its last for many a year thereafter.

In the eighties Mancos was forty miles from the nearest railway, but
news of the reckless extravagances of its visiting miners and cowboys
tempted Fells Brothers' "Greatest Aggregation on Earth of Ring Artists
and Monsters" to visit it. Dusted and costumed outside of town, down
the main street of Mancos the circus bravely paraded that morning, its
red enamelled paint and gilt, its many-tinted tights and spangles,
making a perfect riot of brilliant colors over the prevailing dull gray
of valley and town.

Streets, stores, saloons, and dance halls were swarming with the
outpouring of the ranches and the mines, men who drank abundantly but
in the main a rollicking, good-na