The paint pots, springs of boiling mud of red, gray, and different colors, are to be seen in several localities. The roads in many places are black with small pieces of glass, and I saw chunks of it by the road-side, from the Obsidian Cliffs, mountains of black and different colored glass, two or three hundred feet high; but these, as well as the Mammoth Hot Springs, I missed by not going forty miles out of my route. Still, as it was, I saw enough, much more than I can describe. Reaching Fire Hole, where the only blacksmith's shop within a hundred miles is situated, I found the blacksmith was off on a drunk, so I had to try and fix the handle bar or walk a hundred miles to Beaver Cañon, for my supply of money was nearly gone. But I found something with which to run a new thread upon the handle bar, and getting out the broken piece I screwed the shortened bar in place, and went on my way rejoicing. The day before I started back for Beaver Cañon a detachment of United States troops were sent out in that direction from the park, to intercept and drive back a party of Indians who were reported on their way from a reservation to hunt in the park. The first day I saw and heard nothing of them, but the next forenoon, when about ten miles from any ranch, for the ranches are fifteen or twenty miles apart, an Indian came galloping up from across the meadow. According to tradition my scalp should have been the first thing he asked for, but instead he wanted to know, in broken English, if I had seen a party of Indians hunting, and asked where I came from, how many miles a day I could make, and the usual string of questions that almost every white person asks, and then he said, "You know my name?" I replied I had no recollections of ever meeting him before. "My name is Major Jim, Major," with considerable emphasis on the last word; and with that we parted, and I reached Beaver Cañon without further incident. Distance traveled with the wheel, 3,505 miles. CHAPTER XXII. THROUGH THE BLACK CAÑON AND THE ROYAL GORGE. One day's ride by train from Beaver Cañon through a section of country composed mostly of sand and sage brush, overlying that same sheet of lava, and through Mormon cities of eight and ten thousand inhabitants, where they had made the desert blossom for miles around, brought me back to Salt Lake City. Here occurred the first rain that had caused even an hour's delay in my trip since the middle of May, three months and a half ago. After leaving Omaha, sufficient rain had not fallen in the eight or ten States and Territories through which I had passed to dampen my shirt sleeves, and when I reached the Yellowstone, it had been so long since I had even felt a rain drop, that the thorough wetting I received there was really enjoyed. But on reaching Salt Lake City, I was delayed a week by a cloud burst on the line of the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad, which swept away seven bridges and a mile or two of track.