We proceeded on our journey to Santa Fe, which took us twelve days. Here we met our old friend, Joe Favor, who we had sold our furs to the year before, and who bought them again this season. Furs being still higher this year, notwithstanding our small catch, Uncle Kit did fairly well out of his winter's trapping. After settling up with Uncle Kit, Mr. Favor called me into the store and presented me with a single-shot, silver-mounted pistol, also a knife that weighed two and one-fourth pounds, that had been manufactured in St. Louis. We stopped at Santa Fe and rested two days, after which time Uncle Kit, Johnnie West, myself and my pet panther returned home to Taos, which was a distance of ninety miles from Santa Fe. CHAPTER VI. TWO BOYS RIDE TO THE CITY OF MEXICO. ELEVEN HUNDRED MILES OF TRIAL, DANGER AND DUTY---A GIFT HORSE.--THE WIND RIVER MOUNTAINS. It was now the spring of 1850. I was eighteen years old and beginning to think myself a man. Uncle Kit asked me to go to the City of Mexico, saying that he owed a man there two hundred and fifty dollars, and wished to pay him. He also told me that he would have Juan, the Mexican boy, accompany me on the journey, but cautioned me not to let any one know that I had money. "For," said he, "them Mexican guerrillas would kill you if they knew you had money about you." The reader can fancy two boys at the age of eighteen, starting out on a trip of eleven hundred miles, over a wild country, with no settlement except hostile Indians and Mexicans, who are worse than Indians if they know a person has money about him. At that time there were no roads across the country in that direction; nothing but a trail--a part of the way not even that--and the whole country full of Mexican guerrillas--or, as we would term them, Mexican robbers--who made it a business to murder people whom they suspected of having money, and who would even massacre whole trains of emigrants, take what money they might have, their provisions and clothing, burn their wagons and drive their stock away. The fact is that many of the depredations committed in those days, for which the Indians were blamed, were done by those fiendish Mexicans. When the time arrived for starting and we were mounted, Uncle Kit, Johnnie West and Mr. Hughes came out to bid us good-bye. Johnnie West said: "Well, I am afraid I shall never see you again, for those Mexican guerrillas are worse than Indians, especially when they think a traveler has money about him." All this helped to put me on my guard, and I didn't even tell Juan that I had money with me.