We might have been taking an unconscious part in some vast moving picture production, or, more easily still, if we overlooked the fact of our own motor car, we could have supposed ourselves crossing the plains in the days of the caravans and stage coaches, when roads were trails, and bridges were not!

To Pueblo by way of Canyon City and over the Royal Gorge loop, you go through great defiles between gigantic mountains, then out on a shelf road overlooking now vistas of mountains, now endless plains, now hanging over chasms two or three thousand feet deep, now dipping down, down to the brink of the river tearing along the base of the canyon walls. All of the mountain roads of Colorado are splendidly built—even though some of their railless edges are terrifying to anyone light of head, and by no means to be recommended to an inexpert driver. One famously beautiful drive has a turntable built at an otherwise impossibly sharp bend.

After Pueblo—which by the way is not in the least quaint or Indian as its name promised, but a smoky and smeltering industrious little Pittsburgh—you come out upon the plains, plains that look as you imagined them, on which cattle and cowboys ranged and prairie schooners came slowly over the horizon. A few miles beyond Pueblo, exactly like a scene in the moving pictures, we passed three of the white-topped wagons, their hoods rocking and gleaming in the sun and little burros with saddles on them trotting on either side. A man walked at the head of the caravan and two others walked behind. One wagon was driven by a woman, while a man slept, and two children peered out at us from within. A young man drove the second wagon; by his side was a young woman holding a baby. All that was needed to make a frontier drama was a band of befeathered Indians on the warpath.

A little way farther we saw a cowboy galloping over the plains swinging a lariat. He laughed when we came up to him, as though he had been caught doing something foolish. In the next few miles we passed another caravan and through a herd of cattle driven by three cowboys, but not a sign of our friend, the Englishman, with whom we had planned to lunch. He, having taken the direct road, which was about sixty miles or so shorter than ours, had agreed to select an attractive spot and wait for us. We had about decided that he had either been lost or overlooked, when we saw a team coming toward us and behind it, being towed, his nice, new, little car. He had come to a ford through a wide, swift river which he so mistrusted from the start that he made his valet wade across it first. But as the water came up only to the man’s knees, and the bottom was reported to be firm and pebbly, the Honorable Geoffrey plunged in—and, bang! she blew up! The water flooding his carburetor sucked into the hot cylinders and was changed so violently into steam that it blew off the cylinder heads!

Mixed with our very real sympathy with the Englishman was not a little doubt as to whether we had better risk a like fate. The driver of the team, seeing our doubt, explained: “The river’s a mite high just now, but when you come to the bank, just go in slow and steady, and if the water comes up too high, stop your engine quick, and fire a revolver! See! I’ll hear you and send someone to pull you through!”

The thought of luncheon had vanished. We parted with our unfortunate friend and approached with not a little trepidation the rushing waters that had wrecked him. The river looked formidable enough; wide, swift, bubbling, and opaque—like coffee with cream, exactly. We remembered that it had a gravel bottom and that its greatest depth was very little over the drenched valet’s knees.

We went in very cautiously, very slowly, the water came up and up, almost to the floor boards. The rest of the story is perfectly tame and flat; our car went through it like a duck!

Further on, we came to several fords, all small and shallow, and we splashed through them gleefully. We passed great herds of cattle and any number of cowboys. We saw hundreds of gophers, ran our wheels over two rattlesnakes, and escaped—one skunk.

In Trinidad we ran across our first companion motor tourists. “Kansas City to Los Angeles” was written in letters six inches high with an American pennant on one side, and the name of a popular machine on the other. Another car, a Ford, announcing that it was bound from Lincoln, Nebraska, to San Francisco, had enough banners to decorate the room of a schoolboy. The owners of these two talked volubly on touring in general and the roads ahead in particular. The owner of the Ford, adjusting the vizor of his yachting cap and pulling on his gauntlets, looked at us doubtfully.

“Well,” said he, “everyone to his own liking! I myself prefer a shorter, lighter car!”

“Are you going to try to take that machine down the Bajada?” asked the other. “I’m glad I haven’t the job of driving her even over the Raton!”

“My, but she’s a peach!” exclaimed an enthusiastic mechanic. “Don’t you have no fear, mister!” he whispered to E. M. “The stage coaches they used to go over this road to Santa Fé; if they could get over, I guess you can!”

It had never occurred to us that we couldn’t, but the reminder of the lumbering caravans was comforting, and we started tranquilly to climb the Colorado side of the Raton divide. We passed first one, and then the other of the two cars, whose owners had little opinion of ours. Did they believe their ugly snub-nosed tin kettles, panting and puffing and chug-chugging up the grade, like asthmatic King Charles spaniels, better hill-climbers than our beautiful, big, long engine, that took the ascent without the slightest loss of breath even in the almost nine thousand feet of altitude? We had looked at the two machines in much the same way that passengers in the cab of a locomotive might look at a country cart trundling along the road, for we had pulled smoothly by them in much the same way that the locomotive passes the cart.

We have all heard the story of the hare and the tortoise, and the old adage, “He who laughs last——” It was all very well as long as we remained in the state of Colorado! But the instant we crossed the Divide, our beautiful great, long, powerful machine lay down perfectly flat on its stomach and could not budge until one of these despised snub-nosed spaniels heaped coals of fire on our heads by kindly pulling us out.

Because of their highness—one of the chief attributes of their ugliness—the other two cars could under the present conditions travel along without hindrance, whereas we discovered to our chagrin that we had far too little clearance, and the first venturing into New Mexico ruts held us fast.

The road over the Raton Pass, by the way, was originally built by a famous character known as “Uncle” Dick Wooten. Having defrayed all the expenses out of his own pocket he established a tollgate so that he might somewhat reimburse himself. The American traders paid the toll without a murmur; the Mexicans paid only through the persuasion of a revolver, and the Indians would not pay at all. After going over the road we agreed with the Indians.

The rest of our story all the way to Santa Fé is one long wail. But in justice to the roads of New Mexico, it is necessary to go into some explanation of the wherefore of our particular difficulties. In the first place we went out there in the very early spring after the worst of the thaw, but before any repairs, which might have been made for the summer season, had been begun. As for equipment, ours could not by any possibility have been worse.

With a wheel base of one hundred and forty-four inches, our car has a center clearance of only eight inches! Furthermore, we have a big steel exhaust pipe that slants from ten inches above the ground under the engine to eight and one-half inches above the ground where it protrudes behind the left rear wheel. Therefore, where shorter, higher cars can go with perfect ease, it requires great skill and no little ingenuity for a very low and long one to keep clear of trouble. For instance, over deep-rutted roads we have to stay balanced on the ridges on either side, like walking a sort of double tight rope; if we slide down into the rut, we have to be jacked up and a bridge of stones put under to lift us out again. On many of the sharp corners of the mountain passes we have to back and fill two and often four times, but our real difficulties are all because of that troublesome exhaust pipe.

Out on the cattle ranches they build a great many queer little ditch crossings; two planks of wood with edges like troughs, and a wheel-width apart. They are our particular horror. Again, right wheels went over perfectly, but the only way we can get the left ones over is to build up the hollows with pieces of wood—some barrel staves we found by luck and that we now always carry with us.

Another particular joy to us is sliding down into and clambering out of arroyos, on the edge of which the car loves to make believe it is a seesaw. Our only good fortune seems to be in having plenty of power, and the carburetor high enough not to be flooded—as yet—by any streams we have gone through. Once, in order to find a bank that we could crawl up on, we had to wade up the stream, with the possibility of quicksand, for nearly half a mile.

After three days of this sort of experience, you can’t help wincing at the very sight of ruts or rocks or river beds, in exactly the same way that you wince at the close approach of dentist’s instruments.

Between Trinidad and Las Vegas we were overtaken by a blizzard. It rained, hailed, and finally snowed; and it all passed by us in less than an hour. But in the midst of it we lost our way and wandered for miles across the prairie. Finally, at the end of about twenty miles we saw an open wagon and two men resting under it, but they spoke only Spanish and we understood their directions so vaguely that when our road disappeared into hilly, roadless prairie, and we came to a new bridge without any tracks leading to it, and apparently uncrossable between it and us, it was snowing again, there were no shadows to tell the points of the compass by. As E. M. drove on at a snail’s pace, wondering which direction to turn, two Indians on ponies appeared over the edge of a nearby hill.

Again we had no language in common. But we repeated, “Las Vegas,” and they, gravely motioning us to follow, led us through a labyrinthian path between the hillocks to the mesa from which the bridge started. Although they helped us with greatest willingness, and accepted a coin with grave courtesy, their faces were as expressionless as wood-carvings and neither uttered a sound nor smiled.

Finally, because we were hungry and not by reason of any inviting charm at that particular point of the earth’s most dreary surface, we stopped for luncheon. We had just about spread out our food paraphernalia when, turning at the sound of a galloping hoofed animal, we saw a horseman tearing across the plains toward us. He rode as a brigand might, and as only a Westerner can. Standing in his stirrups rather than sitting in his saddle, and seemingly unaffected by the rocking motion of his mount, his body was poised level with the horizon.

Was he a highwayman, one of those notorious bad men that the Southwest is said to be infested with, or was he just a cowboy? His outline fitted into any sort of a part your fear or delight might imagine. The wide-brimmed hat, bandanna handkerchief around his neck, leather cuffs on his shirt and murderous-looking cartridge belt and revolver, suited equally a make-up for good or bad.

My heart thumped with the excitement of a possible hold up, and yet I was far too fascinated to feel either fear or inclination to escape. As he came nearer, he came slower, and when quite close he brought his horse to a leisurely walk that had no longer any hold-up suggestion in it and I took a bite out of my hitherto untouched sandwich. When almost beside us, he leaned a little sideways in his saddle and glanced at our State license number, and then at us, with a manner as casual and unconcerned as though we might have been an inanimate hillock of the landscape.

Then, “Howdy, strangers!” he said. The tone of his voice was friendly enough, in spite of his taciturn and utterly unsmiling expression. It has struck us all through the West how seldom anyone has smiled.

“How are you!” echoed E. M., matching manner for manner. His tone, too, had a friendly ring, but he went on opening a tin of potted meat as though no one else were present.

“Come all the way from back East in that machine?” the Westerner asked, with a little more interest. “How long you been comin’?”

E. M. glanced up from his tin-opening and the two exchanged a few remarks on the subject of roads and horses and motors and then, as nearly as I can remember, the Westerner said:

“It’d be a mighty long ride on a cayuse! Which them machines shorely disregards distance a whole lot.”

E. M. asked the Westerner, “Won’t you have some lunch with us? Awfully glad if you will!”

“Thank you,” but he moved a little away from us, as though for the first time embarrassed. “Thank you!” he said again. “I et dinner ’bout an hour ago!”

“We have only cold things,” I explained, not only thrilled at an encounter with a real live cowboy but attracted by his distinctly pleasing personality. He had no manner at all and yet in his absence of self-consciousness there was very real dignity. And in contrast to the copper-brown of his face his unsmiling eyes were so blue that their color was startling. I had been wrapped in admiration of E. M.’s color, which I thought as brown as sun could make a man, but beside this other of the plains, E. M. looked almost pallid.

“I don’t aim to have you deny yourself nothin’ for me!” he hesitated.

“Oh, we have lots of food!” said Celia. “Cold food, though, you know; nothing hot.”

For the first time his eyes crinkled into a half smile:

“The grub we get is hot, which is most of the virchoos you can claim for it.”

Meanwhile E. M. had proffered an open box of eggs and sandwiches. The other dismounted, threw the reins forward over his horse’s neck, and accepted our hospitality. He turned a paper plate and a thin tin spoon in his hands as though dubious of such flimsy utility until he discovered it was to be used for ice cream. Hard frozen ice cream under the midday sun and fifty miles from where it could be bought, interested him.

“I’ve seen bottles for liquids, but I’ve never seen one like that for solids. It sure is cold!” he said. And with its coldness, he quite thawed. He did not look more than thirty, yet talked quite a while about the old times that he himself remembered, generalities for the most part, but with a lingering keenness in describing the qualifications that men on the range used to have.

Also he told us a string of yarns—that may have been true—or they may have been merely the type of divertissement whereby Westerners love to entertain themselves at the expense of Eastern credulity. One amusing story, at any rate, was of the hold-up of a passenger stage by a single masked man. Afterwards when the sheriff and his men followed his horse’s tracks, they suddenly disappeared as though the earth had swallowed them. It had. They found the thief’s buried boots with horseshoes nailed on them on a path that had too many footprints to single out one to follow.

He added quite regretfully that cow-punching was not what it used to be. Cattle were getting tame and the ranches were enclosed in wire fences and life was so soft and easy, that cattle raising was no more exciting than raising sheep. Finally he volunteered:

“I’ve got folks in Massachusetts; my brother Sam’s in Boston.”

When E. M. told him that he had come from Boston, as he was still a student at Harvard, the Westerner could neither understand how it was that E. M. did not know his brother, nor that a man of such an age and size could still be getting an education.

“Book learning” was a good thing, he thought, but twenty years of age was too late in his opinion to be still acquiring it. He himself had run away from home at the age of eleven. Not because of ill-treatment, but merely that it seemed the manly thing to do. In his opinion a boy was a no-account specimen who would stay past his twelfth year “hangin’ round his womenfolks.”

To run away and never send a word home seems to be the commonplace behavior of Western boys. “I don’t know how your mothers stand the anxiety,” I said aloud, “not to know whether their sons are even alive.”

“I reckon that’s so. I never showed up nor wrote for six years. One evening I walks in on the old folks, and they didn’t recognize me; the old woman went plum’ over backwards when she saveys it was me. That was some years ago and I haven’t been back since.”

Having finished luncheon E. M. cranked the car, and our guest gathered up the trailing reins of his patiently standing horse. Once his rider was in the saddle, however, the broncho, as though to show what he could do, gave quite a gallery display of bucking, while his rider gave no less an exhibition of Western horsemanship, rolling a cigarette in tranquil disregard of his pony’s hump-backed leaps, which, however, soon settled down into a steady gallop that carried our friend across the plains. On the top of a nubble he waved to us and we waved back as we continued, on our side regretfully, our separate ways.

We have passed any number of little Mexican, or Indian, adobe villages. One house was surrounded by a picket fence painted bright laundry blue. Several had blue door and window frames. The houses were all one-storied and the people looked more Mexican than Indian.

When we finally arrived, without further difficulty, at Las Vegas, it seemed rather questionable whether we would be able to go on next day or not. The barometer was down, several other motorists doleful and the outlook very glum.

“What did you start so early in the season for?” we heard one driver ask another.

“Well,” said the second, “I don’t mind a little speculation as to what you’re going to run into. If you know the road ahead of you is all fine and dandy, what’s to keep your interest up?”

Leaving Las Vegas early the next morning, we encountered the same erratic weather that we ran through the day before. When we happened to be under an unclouded area, we could see that all about us were separate storm clouds, black smudges against an otherwise clear sky. As we drove beneath one of the black areas, we were deluged with rain, or hail, or snow, and through it came into sunny weather again. It was the most curious sensation to run into a blinding storm, and being able to gauge beforehand how long it would take us to pass through it.

As we approached a ford some Mexicans standing beside it motioned us to make a wide sweep; it landed us in deep soft sand up to our hubs. Whereupon they attached their horses to us and pulled us through.

“Do many motors have to be helped?” I asked.

“Every one, all same!” they replied.

We had passed two cars, so I held up my fingers. “Two more are coming!” I said.

They immediately broke into a broad grin.

I rather wonder do they make all cars drive in that large circle to avoid the sand pile!

Between Las Vegas and Santa Fé, the going was the worst yet.

Washed-out roads, arroyos, rocky stretches, and nubbly hills. We just about smashed everything, cracked and broke the exhaust, lost bolts and screws, and scraped along on the pan all of the way.

And yet the dread Bajada Hill, in which we are to drop nine hundred feet in one mile and long cars are warned in every guidebook of the sharp and precipitous turns, is still ahead of us. One thing, if it is worse than from the top of the Raton we might as well be prepared to leave all that is left of us scattered in odd pieces along the road.

The next time we motor the trail to Santa Fé we are unanimously agreed that it is going to be in a very different type of car—or best of all, on the backs of little sure-footed burros!