We easily caught up with the command at night, and laid our plans while in camp for the next few days to come. The troops were not to pass through Santa Fé, and, though we could have made the detour without the colonel's knowledge, it was not safe to run into the very jaws of danger, as General Carleton's headquarters were at Fort Marcy, and he had probably returned to Santa Fé from Fort Union long before this time, travelling with only an escort and the best mules in the department. We had letters to Doctor Steck, "running" a gold-mine about thirty miles from Santa Fé; and as the command passed near by, we started off into the mountains where the mine lay. Wild and rugged as the scenery was, it was not so dreary as I had always fancied every part of the Territory must be. In some places it seemed as if man had done a great deal to make the face of nature hideous. Great unseemly holes were dug here, there, and everywhere--the red, staring earth thrown up, and then left in disgust at not finding the treasures looked for. The company of which Doctor Steck was superintendent seemed to have found the treasures, however, for in their mill half a dozen stamps were viciously crushing and crunching the rock brought down from the mountains above on mule-back. The doctor is a Pennsylvanian, and he tried to have his ranch look as much as possible like a Pennsylvania homestead. There were necessarily slight deviations, more particularly in the furniture of the dwelling-house, which here consisted mainly of double-barrelled shot-guns and repeating rifles. These were merely a set-off, I presume, to the chunks of gold he showed us (the size of a fist), each being a week's "cleanup." There was quicksilver used in gaining the gold (what I know about gaining gold is very little), and the doctor turned a stream of water on the plates under the crushers, and then scraped up the gold for me to look at. I did not learn till months later--though I readily believed it--that this man could travel alone and unarmed through the midst of the Apache country; and did he ever miss his road or want assistance, he had but to make a signal of distress, when the savages would fly to him from their lurking-places, shelter him, and guide him safely back to his white brethren. This I learned first from an old Mexican guide at our camp, who said that the Indians stood in awe of him as a great medicine-man, and loved him for his uniform kindness to them. Santa Fé Mountain behind us, there were no more hills save the sand-hills, that seem shifting and changing from day to day, so that very often in the neighborhood of the Rio Grande, the river itself is followed as a landmark, the land being more unreliable than the water. The big sand-hill opposite Albuquerque, however, seems to be stationary; people who had been here twenty years before remembered the location.