Then came Socarro, where most of the officers spent the day, while the command went into camp some miles below. An English family kept a very pleasant house there, whose good cheer the old colonel had not forgotten from long ago. The garden back of the neatly-built house I thought one of the loveliest spots on earth; not from the fact alone that it contained flowers and some few tall trees, but from the view it afforded of the far-off mountain--probably of the Sierra Maddalena chain, but called Socarro Mountain here. There was the same dreamy haze that hung over the mountain near Albuquerque, and the same bluish-green tint that made it appear wooded to the top. A hot spring takes its rise in the mountain somewhere, and the tiny stream at my feet seemed hardly cold yet, though its waters had travelled many miles from its source. Fort Craig, though an important military post, is not celebrated for the beauties or grandeur of the country surrounding. We crossed the Rio Grande here again--two companies only, the colonel, with the other three, having been assigned to Fort Craig. Toward the Jornada del Muerto we journeyed, making camp before entering the desert at Parajo, the Fra Cristobal of the Texan Santa Fé prisoners who were driven through here in 1842, on their long, weary journey to the city of Mexico. They had been captured, or rather tricked into a surrender, near Anton Chico, and, from Albuquerque down, I traced them all along the Rio Grande. They had been marched on the opposite side of the river, taking in their way Sandia, Valencia, Tome, Casa Colorada, and La Joya, crossing the river at Socarro, and recrossing probably near where Fort Craig now stands. Such heart-rending tales as were told us of the sufferings and the diabolical treatment of these helpless men--mere youths, some of them, the sight of whom brought out all the native tenderness, the true charity there is in the heart of every Mexican woman! As in Albuquerque, the shadow of Governor Armijo--tall and stately, though with something of a braggart in his carriage, and the glare of a hyena in his eye--was ever rising before me, so in this wretched place did I seem always to hear the gentle, pitying "_Pobrecitos!_" of the kind-hearted women, who brought the last bit of _tornale_, the last scrap of _tortilla_ that their miserable homes afforded, to these men who were so soon to be driven like cattle, and shot down like dogs, when their bleeding feet refused to carry them further on their thorny path. Had the horrible stretch of ninety-five miles of desert-land now before us not been christened "Dead Man's Journey" before these unfortunates passed over it, the baptism of the blood of those wantonly slaughtered there would have fastened on it that name forever.