"It's not Boston, if that's what you were looking for; at least there's
no Bunker Hill Monument nor Back Bay anywhere in sight. But I reckon
it's the best they've got. I'm tired enough to take what's offered and
keep still," Bill Banney declared.

I, too, wanted to keep still. I had only a faint memory of a real city.
It must have been St. Louis, for there was a wharf, and a steamboat and
a busy street, and soft voices--speaking a foreign tongue. But the
pictures I had seen, and the talk I had heard, coupled with a little
boy's keen imagination, had built up a very different Santa Fé in my
mind. At that moment I was homesick for Fort Leavenworth, through and
through homesick, for the first time since that April day when I had sat
on the bluff above the Missouri River while the vision of the plains
descended upon me. Everything seemed so different to-night, as if a gulf
had widened between us and all the nights behind us.

We went into camp on the ridge, with the journey's goal in plain view.
And as we sat down together about the fire after supper we forgot the
hardships of the way over which we had come. The pine logs blazed
cheerily, and as the air grew chill we drew nearer together about them
as about a home fireside.

The long June twilight fell upon the landscape. The piñon and scrubby
cedars turned to dark blotches on the slopes. The valley swam in a
purple mist. The silence of evening was broken only by a faint bird-note
in the bushes, and the fainter call of some wild thing stealing forth at
nightfall from its daytime retreat. Behind us the mesas and headlands
loomed up black and sullen, but far before us the Sangre-de-Christo
Mountains lifted their glorified crests, with the sun's last radiance
bathing them in crimson floods.