"I ought to have come West sooner," he replied, "but I couldn't get the
money."

He looked up at me and then out of the window at the sun setting red across
the plains. I tried to make him think of something beside himself, but I
made a mess of it. The meeting with him was a shock to me. Long after dark,
when I had stretched out for the night, I kept thinking of him and
contrasting what I had to look forward to with his dismal future. Somehow
it did not seem fair, and I could not get rid of the idea that I was
selfish.

Next day I had my first sight of real mountains. And the Pennsylvania
hills, that all my life had appeared so high, dwindled to nothing. At
Trinidad, where we stopped for breakfast, I walked out on the platform
sniffing at the keen thin air. When we crossed the Raton Mountains into New
Mexico the sick boy got off at the first station, and I waved good-bye to
him as the train pulled out. Then the mountains and the funny little adobe
huts and the Pueblo Indians along the line made me forget everything else.

The big man with the heavy watch-chain was still on the train, and after he
had read his newspaper he began to talk to me.

"This road follows the old trail that the goldseekers took in forty-nine,"
he said. "We're comin' soon to a place, Apache Pass, where the Apaches used
to ambush the wagon-trains, It's somewheres along here."

Presently the train wound into a narrow yellow ravine, the walls of which
grew higher and higher.

"Them Apaches was the worst redskins ever in the West. They used to hide on