Sunday, he'll look at that kitchen and put Gertrude on the trail to Cowles. My friend is casting off her burdens and riding into the mountains with Nan Mitchell. If Timoteo doesn't come back won to our cause, her record in the A. E. F. will be disproved.

Alone in the casa to-night. But all the strangeness is gone. I think of Gertrude up there under the pine forest without envy. It is utterly satisfying to be here on this terrace, learning the chirping note of Tesuque crickets; recognizing the rustle of Salomé's hungry poodle in the bushes; taking my fill of the Southwestern night sky, till I seem to be actually swimming in deep bright blue-blue pools sparkling with phosphorescence; still blue pools reflecting the stars of some yet more distant crystal heaven. I wonder whether my material uncle, who went to old Mexico as a young man and stayed seven years, used to look on such a sky and say, "This is why I left New England." Queer that people so devoted to family furniture and stone walls should have our tendency to migrate. My grandfather paid dear for his migration. On the California ranch where he established himself after the Civil War he was-as my aunt solemnly warned me on the eve of my departure-"murdered by a Mexican."

Two oblong yellow windows in the village to-night. And concealed in the warm dark air is a voice about the age of Matias's or Ramon's, singing a Mexican love song. Each verse begins gentle, imploring, but ends with a change of key that stabs like a knife. Something of this sort:

Sweet, my sweet, Lalia, my sad,

A kiss, give a kiss to your Mexican lad. Your kiss would crumble the mud of a wall. Curse my girl, she's a cactus, her lips are like gall.

Curse my girl-as I listen to the queer threat in the melody, I think of the story Frank told to-day at dinner. When

quite a little boy at the district school in another part of the state he saw one of the older Mexican boys go up to a pretty muchacha walking to school with two girl friends.

"Maria, will you marry me?"

"No," she answered, laughing. Whereupon the suitor pulled out a pistol, shot her in the heart, and then killed himself in the road in the midst of the shrieking children.

July 15th.

Each week brings a new vicissitude. The Acequia Madre went dry just as Timoteo had agreed to make our kitchen safe for democracy. Adobe bricks cannot be laid in the wall without mud mortar mixed with water-so the kitchen had to wait. It seems a little odd to the tenderfoot that when the heavens are streaming (so much so that we nearly lost those same bricks by disintegration) the ditch should be empty. The floods that come down from the mountains are precisely the reason-they wash out the channel that leads the water from the mountain stream into the acequia. So Tim had to wait until all the male population of Tesuque had been called out by the Mayordomo to repair damages.

Now we have a good, strong Democratic wall (built in two days, whereas José spent five on his failure). The roof and floor must wait until next week, for to-morrow is Gertrude's last chance to collect data in regard to the Indians. There is supposed to be a dance at San Ildefonso and we have long planned a week-end ride to the pueblo with our two friends.

MISS TRUE'S RANCH, July 16th. The shade of this apple orchard seems like the green gloom of the bottom of the ocean, after the glare of the desert roads. Extraordinarily delicious! Our blankets and packs are scattered under the trees among the hollyhocks. Mrs. Thompson, the wife of Miss True's "rancher,' whom we found occupying one end of the long adobe farmhouse, would have unlocked the main house for our benefit

in Miss True's lamented absence, but we insist we are going to sleep outdoors. The racy Mrs. Thompson and her sister, a little, brown wrinkled person (they both suggest "Westerners" in a Bernard Shaw play), are all in a twitter at our unexpected arrival, combined with the odd determination of my three friends to have a swim in the Rio Grande. I could not for my soul have "made" that quarter of a mile down to the river. Thirty-five miles with no training but a few jog trots in and out of Santa Fe.

My bones may be weary, but I feel recreated by the beauty my eyes have seen-and amazed that I have actually crossed the wide space between the two great mountain ranges which make the boundaries of my daily panorama. Miss True's ranch lies as close to the one as our little adobe to the other. So the Jemez, which usually tower as the blue ethereal back-drop to our view, are now reduced to a series of strange, graywhite cliffs with flat tops; whereas the red foothills of the Sangre de Cristo have leaped heavenward into a lofty, jagged line of peaks. I am amazed, too, that I have actually done the thing I have so long dreamed of doing-forded the Rio Grande just beyond that most romantic of landmarks, the Black Mesa.

The square, velvety mass looks from our knoll almost due north. But, of course, we could make no bee line for our objective, the Indian village which lies at its base. We had to follow the meanderings of the Española road-or call it the Taos road-the single, hard, white highway that leads north from Santa Fe and out through the narrow arm of the Tesuque Valley into the wider valley of the Rio Grande. Gertrude and I had been over it before by motor in early spring. But how little one knows New Mexico till one travels it on borseback in summer! Some one gave me, as a child, a "Curtis" photograph of a vast cañon with high rock walls in which are lost a few pygmies on horseback. Well, I have felt all day like

one of those pygmies. In this part of New Mexico one always seems to be traveling in a cañon, great or small. Even the Rio Grande Valley is a larger cañon between two mountain ranges. But what no photograph can renderand will any canvas ever render it, though this is a painters' country?—is the brilliance of the colored spaciousness one moves in, the strength of the land which, as soon as one has reached any sort of vantage point, reveals to the eye its hard, bony structure, its sandy muscles.

To-day, by the time we had got out of the cultivated valley bottom to the place where Tom, the taxi man, points out the "Camel," and Greek and Egyptian temples pile themselves up in golden sand, at least six thundershowers were blackening six quarters of the heavens, and lightning was flashing up in broken perpendiculars, as the guns used to flash on the western front. But these fireworks were ten, twenty, fifty miles away, and the Liliputian riders progressed in a glare of sun, in a blazing silence shattered only by the jolly hoofs of "Buck" and "Billy" and "Blue" and Demecio Griego's Mexican "race horse."

It was borne in on us, as we paused at the Pojoaque corner for some “soft drinks" which the Mexican storekeeper fished out of his well, that there could be no dance going on-nobody on the way. But what did we care? In our vast desert ride we had passed no houses since we left Tesuque, save one village just the color of the sand. But the road into which we now turned had the quality the French call intime; it was friendly; it was bordered with gay little Mexican houses with colored inset portales, and woodwork painted green and orange and blue, and dooryards full of dahlias and hollyhocks. Great box-elder trees made patches of black shade on the white road. Lush fields of intense green corn stretched toward the legendary slopes of the Black Mesa, the red-gold river, and the purple peaks beyond. We had come down two thousand feet since

we left home, and our horses, taking a deep breath of valley freshness, started on a gallop for the pueblo.

As we rode into the big, oblong plaza, built about with a continuous row of one- and two-story adobes, the village seemed dozing a brown, Egyptian sleep. The cottonwoods made a tattered, wavering pattern on the plaza's yellow floor. No sign of dancers around the kiva.

"Let's look for Alfonso, first," said Katharine, dismounting.

Alfonso is an artist, a remarkable artist, though untaught-because untaught, the Hendersons would say. His traditional dance pictures were by far the most interesting things at the Independent Show in New York last winter. Alfonso's mother met us at the door and, recognizing our painter as a friend, with smiles and broken Spanish led us into her clean, empty interior. A long adobe bench built into the whitewashed wall, a few pottery jars and bowls of meal and water, a string of gorgeous blankets hanging on a rope stretched under the vigas: it was the typical Pueblo house and in it the typical thick-set Pueblo woman with her broad, red-brown face, her bobbed black hair, short, shiftlike dress, high white buckskin boots, redand-green woven belt, and silver chains.

But Alfonso had gone to the Santa Fe Museum. So Katharine proposed that we go on and see Julian and Marie. Marie is the best pottery maker of the Rio Grande region. And while she was displaying her beautiful black ollas, the strong-featured Julian saddled his horse and pulled his gray sombrero with its band of silver buttons over his two long braids of black hair.

"Mucho quicksand," he said. "I show you the ford."

Julian is a famous eagle dancer, and as he rode ahead of us between high rows of tasseled corn, and swam his little black pony across the treacherous currents, the supple strength of his muscles showed through the billowing of his gaudy plaid shirt, through the thin blue cotton that covered his lithe, straight

thighs. How he seemed to "belong" to the dramatic cliffs that rose ahead, the region described in archæological treatises as the Pajarito Plateau! The plateau, we knew, lay at the top of those whity-gray cliffs, and above it rose other cliffs, pinkish yellow, where the ancient people carved their dwellings. Gertrude and I began to recall our visit to the Rito de Los Frijoles a few miles to the south. And the last time we approached this ranch was after a visit to the Puyé, a few miles up the river-with Tom to introduce us.

"You got to know Dame True," Tom had said. "She used to be Indian teacher at Santa Clara, and, my! she knows more about the Pueblo Indians than all the rest of 'em put together!"

Tom was certainly right. But tonight, alas! there are to be no stories. Miss True, like Alfonso, has gone to Santa Fe.

I see my friends coming back from the river, waving their towels.

"We've found a perfect haystack where we are going to sleep in the moonlight," calls Gertrude.

And then the voice of Mrs. Thompson: "Ready for supper, girls?" To her sister in the kitchen: "Go ahead, Marge. I guess I got 'em all bunched now."

ESPAÑOLA, July 17th.

Sunday dinner, followed by a siesta in the Española hotel. Our moonlight night on the alfalfa stack was so inspiring that, instead of returning as we came, we are continuing the much longer road on the western side of the Rio Grande through Santa Clara pueblo to this "Western movie town"-that is Alice Corbin's phrase-and then back to Tesuque through the exquisite Santa Cruz.

We had our Indian stories, after all, because Miss True's mother suddenly appeared like a prophetess from the cottage in the field beyond the ranch house where she chooses to live all alone. She is a very tall, thin, commanding old lady

with parted white hair and eyes that flame in deep sockets when she talks of Indian wrongs. I called her a prophetess -I think she is like a figure in Greek tragedy. If I ever write a symbolic play of New Mexico she will be the leader of the chorus. The Indians of Santa Clara, where her daughter was so long a teacher, flock to consult her ancient wisdom "every Sunday of the world," as she said. I could myself listen spellbound for a year.

She suggested to Nan Mitchell and me a plan to ride up Santa Clara Cañon and over the divide into the Zuñi country, with Gertrude's and my ancient friend, Santiago, for guide. We have been consulting the old chief about it this morning. He and his pueblo again wove the same spell of incantation over our spirits that made us captive last year; it is a sort of pastoral spell. For the village spreads out at the edges into wattled corrals huddled full of goats and sheep, and beyond that again into green fields that look down on the Rio Grande. No single big plaza here; the one-story houses are built about a series of tiny barren squares always full of women baking in the beehive ovens, or burning in smoldering fires the black pottery for which Santa Clara is famous. A silent little church faces the whole purple length of the Sangre de Cristo.

As for Santiago, not even the beaver skins twisted about the two braids of white hair that frame his twinkling old face have changed. To be sure, he is no longer Governor. His blue room looks a little sad without the two ebony-andsilver canes that are the badges of the

This is one of the real treasures of the Southwest, not to say of the United States. Of course one reason we found it so beautiful and moving is that the fine white spaces under the carved vigas, the painted altars and frescoed chapels, the strange, tortured brown Cristos and stranger santos in pink ballet skirts are no curiosity for tourists as are the California missions-indeed, few tourists know of their existence-but the center of an ardent religious life. The æsthete who wanders in will recognize Spanish influence transposed to a primitive region, Spanish traditional art handed on through the brains of priests to naïve native craftsmen. But Salomé and the politicians from the tawny cañons tie their wagons at the gate and walk in, hat in hand, to kneel and pray.

Gertrude leaves in three days! Unbelievable and desperate thought! If we lived in a vortex before, it is a very cyclone of activity that now hurls uswith a train of brown men following after-from kitchen to corral.