In the dry clean air of the Southwest all things change slowly. Growth is slow and decay is even slower. The body of a dead horse in the desert does not rot but dessicates, the hide remaining intact for months, the bones perhaps for years. Men and beasts often live to great age. The _pinon_ trees on the red hills were there when the conquerors came, and they are not much larger now—only more gnarled and twisted. This strange inertia seems to possess institutions and customs as well as life itself. In the valley towns, it is true, the railroads have brought and thrown down all the conveniences and incongruities of civilization. But ride away from the railroads into the mountains or among the lava _mesas_, and you are riding into the past. You will see little earthen towns, brown or golden or red in the sunlight, according to the soil that bore them, which have not changed in a century. You will see grain threshed by herds of goats and ponies driven around and around the threshing floors, as men threshed grain before the Bible was written. You will see Indian pueblos which have not changed materially since the brave days when Coronado came to Taos and the Spanish soldiers stormed the heights of Acoma. You will hear of strange Gods and devils and of the evil eye. It is almost as though this crystalline air were indeed a great clear crystal, impervious to time, in which the past is forever encysted. The region in which Ramon’s heritage lay was a typical part of this forgotten land. In the southern end of the Rocky Mountains, it was a country of great tilted _mesas_ reaching above timber line, covered for the most part with heavy forests of pine and fir, with here and there great upland pastures swept clean by forest fires of long ago. Along the lower slopes of the mountains, where the valleys widened, were primitive little _adobe_ towns, in which the Mexicans lived, each owning a few acres of tillable land. In the summer they followed their sheep herds in the upland pastures. There were not a hundred white men in the whole of Arriba County, and no railroad touched it. In this region a few Mexicans who were shrewder or stronger than the others, who owned stores or land, dominated the rest of the people much as the _patrones_ had dominated them in the days before the Mexican War. Here still flourished the hatred for the gringo which culminated in that war. Here that strange sect, the _penitentes hermanos_, half savage and half mediaeval, still was strong and still recruited its strength every year with young men, who elsewhere were refusing to undergo its brutal tortures.