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 f