Deep down in a mighty gorge, nestled beside the stream that gave its name alike to canon and to town, Mancos stewed contentedly in a temperature that would try the strength and temper of any unaccustomed to the climate of southwestern Colorado. Framed in Franciscan-gray sage brush, itself gray as the sage with the dust of pounding hoofs and rushing whirlwinds, at a little distance Mancos looked like an aggregation of dead ash heaps, save where, here and there, dabs of faded paint lent a semblance of patches of dying embers. While raw, uninviting, and even melancholy in its every aspect, for the scattered denizens of a vast region round about Mancos's principal street was the local Great White Way that furnished all the fun and frolic most of them ever knew. To it flocked miners from their dusky, pine-clad gorges in the north, grangers from the then new farming settlement in the Montezuma Valley, cowboys from Blue Mountain, the Dolores, and the San Juan; Navajos from Chillili, Utes from their reservation--a motley lot burning with untamed elemental passions that called for pleasure "straight." Joyously descending upon the town at a breakneck lope before a following high wind that completely shrouded them in clouds of dust, it was not until they pulled up before their favorite feed corral that the outfit learned that Mancos was revelling in quite the reddest red-letter day of its existence, the day of its first visitation by a circus--and also its last for many a year thereafter. In the eighties Mancos was forty miles from the nearest railway, but news of the reckless extravagances of its visiting miners and cowboys tempted Fells Brothers' "Greatest Aggregation on Earth of Ring Artists and Monsters" to visit it. Dusted and costumed outside of town, down the main street of Mancos the circus bravely paraded that morning, its red enamelled paint and gilt, its many-tinted tights and spangles, making a perfect riot of brilliant colors over the prevailing dull gray of valley and town. Streets, stores, saloons, and dance halls were swarming with the outpouring of the ranches and the mines, men who drank abundantly but in the main a rollicking, good-natured lot. While the Cross Canonites were liquoring at the Fashion Bar (Circuit drinking sarsaparilla), Lame Johny, the barkeeper, remarked: "You-uns missed it a lot, not seein' the pr'cesh. She were a ring-tailed tooter for fair, with the damnedest biggest noise-makin' band you ever heard, an' th' p'rformers wearin' more pr'tys than I ever allowed was made. An' say, they've got a gal in th' bunch, rider I reckon, that's jest that damned good to look at it _hurts_. Damned ef I kin git her outen my eyes yet. Say, she's shore prittier than airy red wagon in th' show built like a quarter horse, got eyes like a doe, and a sorrel mane she could hide in. She 's sure a _chile con carne_ proposition, if I ever see one."