The best commentary on the road between Santa Fé and Albuquerque is that it took us less than three hours to make the sixty-six miles, whereas the seventy-three from Las Vegas to Santa Fé took us nearly six. The Bajada Hill, which for days Celia and I dreaded so much that we did not dare speak of it for fear of making E. M. nervous, was magnificently built. There is no difficulty in going down it, even in a very long car that has to back and fill at corners; there are low stone curbs at bad elbows, and the turns are all well banked so that you feel no tendency to plunge off. A medium length car with a good wheel cut-under would run down the dread Bajada as easily as through the driveways of a park! And the entire distance across Sandoval County, although a tract of desert desolation or bleak sand and hills and cactus, is an easy drive over a smooth road. In one place you go through a great cleft cut through an impeding ridge, but most of the way you can imagine yourself in a land of the earth’s beginning and where white man never was. Two Indian shepherds in fact were the only human beings we saw until our road ran into the surprisingly modern city of Albuquerque.

Stopping at the various Harvey hotels of the Santa Fé system, yet not being travelers on the railroad, is very like being behind the scenes at a theater. The hotel people, curio-sellers, and Indians are the actors, the travelers on the incoming trains are the audience. Other people don’t count.

For instance, you enter a tranquilly ordered dining-room. The head waitress attentively seats you, your own waitress quickly fetches your first course, and starts towards the pantry for the second, when suddenly a clerk appears and says, “Twenty-six!” With the uniformity of a trained chorus every face turns towards the clock, and the whole scene becomes a flurry of white-starched dresses running back and forth. Back with empty trays and forth with buttered rolls, radishes, cups of soup, like a ballet of abundance. You wonder if no one is going to bring your second course, but you might as well try to attract the attention of a hive of bees when they are swarming. Having nothing else to do you discover the mystic words twenty-six to be twenty-six places to set. Finally you descry your own waitress dealing slices of toast to imaginary diners at a far table. Then you hear the rumble of the train, the door leading to the platform opens and in come the passengers. And you, having no prospect of anything further to eat, watch the way the train supper is managed. Slices of toast and soup in cups are already at their places, then in files the white-aproned chorus carrying enormous platters of freshly grilled beefsteak, and such savory broiled chicken that you, who are so hungry, can scarcely wait a moment patiently for your own waitress to appear. You notice also the gigantic pots of aromatically steaming coffee, tea and chocolate being poured into everyone’s cup but your own, and ravenously you watch the pantry door for that long tarrying one who went once upon a time to get some of these delectable viands for you.

“Will you have broiled chicken?” asks the faithless She you have been watching for, bending solicitously over a group of strange tourists at the next table. At last when the train people are quite supplied, your speeding Hebe returns to you and apologizes sweetly, “I am sorry but I had to help get train Number Seven’s supper. They’ve eaten all the broiled chicken that was cooked, but I’ll order you some more if you don’t mind waiting twenty minutes.”

By and by the train people leave, your chicken arrives and you finish your supper in commonplace tranquillity. But let us look on at another comedy, for which the scene shifts to the railroad station at Albuquerque where the long stone platform is colorless and deserted. You have always on picture postcards seen it filled with Indians. There is not one in sight. Wait though until ten minutes before the California limited is due. Out of the nowhere appear dozens of vividly costumed Navajos and Hopis; their blankets and long braids woven with red cloth, their headbands and beads and silver ornaments fill the platform with color like a flower display. Old squaws and a few young squat themselves in two rows, forming an aisle between the train and the station salesroom. Although you walk up and down between their forming lines watching them arrange their display of baskets and pottery, they are silent until the first passenger alights, and then unendingly they chorus two words:

“Tain cent!” “Tain cent!” The words sometimes sound like a question, sometimes a statement, but generally a monotonous drone. There is a nice old squaw—although I believe the Hopis don’t call their women squaws—sitting at the end. I tripped and almost fell into her lap. She looked up, smiled, and by her inflection, conveyed, “Oh, my dear, did you hurt yourself?” but what she said was, “Tain cent!”

The third Harvey scene is frankly a vaudeville performance of Indian dancing and singing. The stage the adobe floor of the Indian exhibit room, the walls of which are hung to the ceiling with blankets, beadwork, baskets, clay gods, leather costumes—everything conceivable in the way of Indian crafts. Immediately after supper the tourists take their places on benches ranged against three sides of the apartment. Generally there is a big open fire on the fourth side, adding its flickering light as the last note to a setting worthy of Belasco.

The Indians dance most often in pairs but occasionally there are as many as eight or nine in a row or a circle, with an additional background of others beating time. The typical step is a sort of a shuffling hop; a little like the first step or two of a clog dancer before he gets going, or else just a bent kneed limp and stamp accompanied either by a droning chant or merely a series of sounds not unlike grunts. To our Anglo-Saxon ears and eyes it seemed very monotonous even after a little sample. Yet we are told they keep it up for eight or ten or twelve hours at a stretch, when they are dancing seriously and at home. Dancing to them is a religious ceremony, not merely an informal expression of gayety.

The women we saw wore heavy black American shoes and calico mother hubbards with a ruffle at the bottom, and generally a shawl or blanket around their shoulders. Only one wore the blanket costume as it is supposed to be worn: around her body and fastened on one shoulder leaving the other arm and shoulder bare and also bare feet.

The men were much more picturesque, in dark-colored velvet shirts, silver belts, necklaces of bright beads and white cross-bars that looked like teeth, huge turquoise square-cut earrings and red head-bands. The “Castle cut” head-dress that has been the rage in New York for the last year or two is simply that of the Navajo Indians. Their head-band is a little wider and invariably of red, and the black straight hair ends as stiffly as a tassel.

In some places as at the Grand Canyon, there are Navajo huts and a Hopi communal house where the tourist can see something of the way the Indians live; the way they weave blankets or baskets, beat silver or make and paint pottery.

But to go back to Albuquerque, where although we saw less of the Indians than later in other places, we were lucky enough to hear a great deal about them. After dinner—there was no dancing—we were in the Indian Exhibit room—probably the most wonderful collection of their crafts that there is. As we were admiring an exceptionally beautiful blanket of red, black and white and closely woven as a fine Panama hat, a man—we thought him the proprietor at first—said:

“It took three years’ bargaining to get that blanket from a Navajo chief. You can’t get them made of that quality any more. They’d rather get ten or twelve dollars for a blanket they spend a few weeks on and get paid often, than work a year on a single blanket that they can sell for a hundred.”

He picked out various examples of pattern and weaving and explained relative values. The amount of red, for instance, in the one we had been looking at added greatly to its price. We found out later that although not stationed at Albuquerque, he was one of the Harvey staff, and as we spent the whole evening talking with him, and he might not care to have his name taken in vain, I’ll call him Mr. X. He has lived for years among the Indians. We could have listened to his stories about them forever, but to remember the greater part would be a different matter.

On the subject of business dealings, an Indian, he said, has no idea of credit. No matter how well he knows and trusts you, he wants to be paid cash the moment he brings in his wares. To wait even an hour for his money will not satisfy him. A puzzling thing had happened on the platform that afternoon. I heard a lady say to an old squaw, “I’ll take these three baskets.” Whereupon instead of selling the baskets, the Indian hastily covered all of them with a blanket, got up and went away!

I told this to Mr. X. He considered a minute, then asked:

“Did the lady by chance wear violet?”

“She did!” interposed Celia. “She had on a violet shirtwaist and——”

“That explains it!” Mr. X broke in. “No wonder she ran away. To an Indian violet is the color of evil. None but a witch would wear it. Red is holy; they love red above all colors. Also they love yellow, orange and turquoise.”

As we were talking a young Navajo who was standing near us, suddenly covering his eyes with his arm, rushed from the room. Naturally we looked at our clothes for an evidence of violet but Mr. X. laughed.

“It wasn’t a case of color this time! Do you see that old squaw that just came in? She is his mother-in-law. Navajos won’t look at their wife’s mother; they think they will be bewitched if they do. He is going back to the Reservation tomorrow, because the old woman came down today. He is an intelligent Indian, too, but if he spies a stray cat or dog around tonight, he will probably think it is his mother-in-law having taken that shape. Their belief in witchcraft is impossible to break. At the same time they have an undeniable gift for necromancy, second sight or whatever it may be called, scarcely less wonderful than that of the Hindoos of India. The boy in the basket trick and the rope-climbing trick of Asia are not to be compared with things I have seen with my own eyes in New Mexico.

“I have seen a Shaman, or priest, sing over a bare adobe floor, and the floor slowly burst in one little place and a new shoot of corn appear. I have seen this grow before my eyes until it became a full-sized stalk with ripened corn. Instead of waving a wand, as European magicians do, the priest sings continually and as long as he sings the corn grows, when he stops the cornstalk stops.

“The same Shaman can pour seeds and kernels of corn out of a hollow stalk until all about him are heaping piles of grain that could not be crowded into a thousand hollowed cornstalks. Medicine men of all tribes can cure the sick, heal the injured, get messages out of the air and do many seemingly impossible things.

“Navajos abhor snakes as much as we do, but Moquis hold them sacred. Before their famous snake dance, during which they hold living rattlesnakes in their mouths and bunches of them wriggling in each hand, they anoint their bodies with the juice of an herb, and drink an herb tea; both said to be medicine against snakebite. At all events they don’t seem to suffer more than a trifling indisposition even when they are bitten in the face. One theory is—and it certainly sounds reasonable—that from early childhood the snake priests are given infinitesimal doses of rattlesnake poison until by the time they reach manhood they are immune to any ill effects.”

We had by this time wandered out of the Indian room and seated ourselves in the big rocking-chairs on the veranda of the Alvarado, Mr. X. with us. Every now and then he stopped and said that he thought he had talked about enough, but we were insatiable and always begged him to tell us some more. Of the many things he told us, the most interesting of all were stories of the medicine men and the combination of articles that constitutes each individual’s own fetich or “medicine.” To this day not only medicine men, but chiefs, would as soon be parted from their own scalp-locks, as from this talisman. Each has his own medicine that can never be changed, though upon occasion it may have a lucky article added to it. Most commonly the fetich is composed of a little bag made of the pelt of a small animal and filled with a curious assortment of articles such as bear’s claws, wolf’s teeth, things that are associated with the wearer’s early prowess in the world, or more likely a former existence. At all events, an Indian’s standing and power in his tribe is dependent upon this fetich, and to lose it is to lose not only power but caste—much more than life itself.

In the days past of the Redman’s war prowess, this sort of “medicine” worn by warriors most especially, was supposed to grant them supernatural powers to kill enemies and preserve their own life. If they were wounded or killed, it meant that the enemy’s medicine was even more powerful. But using the word “medicine” in our sense, their “medicine men”—healers—certainly know of mysteriously potent cures, the secrets of which no white man understands.

Their most usual way of effecting a cure is, apparently, to dance all night in a circle around the afflicted person, with curative results that are too uncannily like magic to be believable. One case that Mr. X. vouched for personally was that of a child that was dying of blood poison. Two white surgeons of high repute said that the child had scarcely a chance of living even by amputating an arm that had mortified beyond any hope of saving; and that without the operation, its death was merely a question of hours. The Indian parents refused to have it done, and insisted upon taking the child to the Reservation. The white doctors declared the child could not possibly survive such a journey but as, in their opinion, it could not live long anyway, the parents might as well take it where they pleased. They started for the Reservation. It was Sunday. “Four sleeps we come back, all right,” said the father. On Thursday, the fourth day, exactly, back they came again with the child well, and its arm absolutely sound. That a mortified arm should get well, comes close to the unbelievable—even though vouched for, as in this case, by several reputable witnesses.

As a case of mental telepathy, Mr. X. told us that time and time again he had known Indians to get news out of the air. An old Navajo one day cried out suddenly that his squaw was “heap sick.” He was so excited that he would not wait for Mr. X. to telegraph and find out if there was any truth in his fear, nor would he wait for a train, but started on a pony to ride to the Reservation. After he had gone a telegram came saying that the squaw had been bitten by a rattlesnake and was dying.

After a while the topic turned upon our own trip. We had intended to ship the car at Albuquerque, but the road from Santa Fé had been so good we were encouraged to go further and Mr. X.’s enthusiasm settled it.

“Having come down into this part of the country,” he said, “you really ought not to miss seeing some of the wonders of our Southwest. The Pueblo of Acoma is a little out of the way, but there is nothing like it anywhere. ‘The city of the sky’ they call it—I won’t tell you any more about it—you just go and look at it for yourselves. Isleta, a short distance south from here, is a pueblo that lots of tourists go to see, and Laguna is fairly well known, too. They are both on your road if you go to Gallup. Acoma is off the beaten track but you wait and send me a postcard if it is not worth considerable exertion, even to behold it from the desert. The Enchanted Mesa, the higher one that you come to first, is interesting chiefly because of its story. The truth of it I can’t vouch for, but it is said to have been inhabited once by people who reached its dizzy summit by a great ladder rock that leaned against its sides. One day in a terrific storm while the men were all plowing in the valley below, the rock ladder was blown down and the women and children were left in this unscalable height to perish. Laguna is about halfway between here and the continental divide, or about one-third of the distance to Gallup. Acoma is perhaps eighteen miles south of Laguna where you can get a guide and also more definite information. Or you can just go south across the plain by yourselves, fairly near the petrified forest later—no, that not until you are on the way to Holbrook. You also skirt the edge of the lava river—I don’t think you’d know it was anything to look at unless you were told. At the time of the eruption, the lava on the surface cooled while that underneath it was still boiling, and the steam of the boiling mass burst through the hardened surface and splintered it like broken glass. Glass is in fact the substance it most resembles. The country is full of stories of men and animals that have tried to cross it, but neither hoofs nor cowhide boots have ever been made that can stay intact on its gashing surface.

“And of course you must get a glimpse of the painted forest. After that you can take a train when you please”—then with a laugh he corrected—“when you get where a train goes.”

“Where could we sleep?” asked Celia.

“Well, you can sleep at the hotel in Gallup—it isn’t an Alvarado but it’ll shelter you. For my own part, if you have a fine night, I’d sleep out!”