in the Northwest that last year
the rangers had to take up a subscription among themselves to bury the
men who perished fighting fire. Pecos Service, too, had its struggle
against spite and incendiarism in the old days; but that is a story long
past; and to-day, Pecos stands as an example of what good trail making
will do to prevent fires.

We walked across the almost flat table of Grass Mountain and looked down
the east side into the Las Vegas Canyon. Four feet of snow still clung to
the east side of Grass Mountain, almost a straight precipice; and across
the forested valley lay another ten or twelve feet of snow on the upper
peaks of the Sangre de Christo Range. A pretty legend clings to that
Sangre de Christo Range; and because people repeat the foolish statement
that America's mountains lack legend and lore, I shall repeat it, though
it is so very old. The holy _padre_ was jogging along on his mule one
night leading his little pack burro behind, but so deeply lost in his
vesper thoughts that he forgot time and place. Suddenly, the mule
stopped midway in the trail. The holy father looked up suddenly from his
book of devotions. The rose-tinted afterglow of an Alpine sunset lay on
the glistening snows of the great silent range. He muttered an _Ave
Maria_; "Praise be God," he said; "for the Blood of Christ;" and as
Sangre de Christo the great white ridge has been known ever since.

CHAPTER IV

THE CITY OF THE DEAD IN FRIJOLES CANYON

I am sitting in one of the caves of the Stone Age. This is not fiction
but fact. I am not speculating as to _how_ those folk of neolithic times
lived. I am writing in one of the cliff houses _where_ they lived,
sitting on the floor with my feet resting on the steps of an entrance
stone stairway worn hip-deep through the volcanic rock by the moccasined
tread of aeons of ages. Through the cave door, looking for all the world
from the outside like a pigeon box, I can see on the floor of the valley
a community house of hundreds of rooms, and a sacred _kiva_ or
ceremonial chamber where gods of fire and water were invoked, and a
circular stone floor where men and women danced the May-pole before
Julius Caesar was born, before--if Egyptian archaeologists be correct--the
dynasties of the Nile erected Pyramid and Sphinx to commemorate their
own oblivion. To my right and left for miles--for twelve miles, to be
correct--are thousands of such cave houses against the face of the
cliff, as t