se. It is a
combination of confidence and dexterity, rather than strength. There is
a rigging to the bridle that throws a horse if he kicks; and our wild
one not only kept his traces for a rough drive of nearly twenty miles
but suffered himself to be handled by a young girl of the party.

[Illustration: The pueblo of Taos, New Mexico, whose inhabitants trace
their lineage back centuries before the advent of the Spanish
conquistadores]

Twilight on the Upper Mesas is a thing not to be told in words and only
dimly told on canvas. There is the primrose afterglow, so famous in the
Alps. The purple mountains drape themselves in lavender veils. Winds
scented with oil of sagebrush and aroma of pines come soughing through
the juniper hills. The moon comes out sickle-shaped. You see a shooting
star drop. Then a dim white group of moving forms emerges from the pines
of the mountains--wild horses with leader scenting the air for foe,
coming out for the night run to the drinking pools. Or your horses give
a little sidewise jump from the trail, and you see a coyote loping along
abreast not a gun-shot away. This is a sure-enough-always-no-man's-land,
a jumping-off place for all the earth--too high for irrigation farming,
too arid for any other kind of farming, and so an unclaimed land. In the
twenty-mile drive, you will see, perhaps, three homesteaders' shanties,
where settlers have fenced off a square and tried ranching; but water is
too deep for boring. Horses turned outside the square join the wild
bands and are lost; and two out of every three are abandoned homesteads.
The Dunn brothers have cut a road in eighteen miles to the Arroyo Hondo,
where their house is, halfway to Taos; and they have also run a
telephone line in.

Except for the telephone wires and the rough trail, you might be in an
utterly uninhabited land on top of the world. The trail rises and falls
amid endless scented juniper groves. The pale moon deepens through a
pink and saffron twilight. The stillness becomes almost palpable--then,
suddenly, you jump right off the edge of the earth. The flat mesa has
come to an edge. You look down, sheer down, 1,000 feet straight as a
plummet--two canyons narrow as a stone's toss have gashed deep trenches
through the living rocks and with a whir of swift waters come together
at the famous place known as the Bridge. You have come on your old
friend the Rio Grande again, narrow and deep and blue from the mountain
snows, an al