After dinner, you go over to the Supervisor's office for advice on going up the canyon. Technically, this is not necessary; but it is wise for a great many reasons. He will tell you where to get, and what to pay for, your camp outfit; where to go and how to go. He will show you a map with the leading trails and advise you as to the next stopping place. To hunt predatory animals--bear and wolf and cat and mountain lion--you need no permit; but if you are an outsider, you need one to get trout and turkey and deer. Another point: are you aware that you are going into a country as large as two or three of the Eastern States put together; and that the forests in the upper canyons are very dense; and that you might get lost; and that it is a good thing to leave somebody on the outside edge who knows where you have gone? On my way back from the Supervisor's office, the sick man called me in and told me his life story and showed me his poem. As he is a Mexican, has been a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and is somewhat of a politician, it may be worth while setting down his views. "What is going to happen in Old Mexico?" "Ah, only one t'ing possible--los Americanos must go in." "Why?" "Well," with a shrug, "Diaz cannot--cannot control. Madero, he cannot control better dan Diaz. Los Americanos must go in." It is a bit of a surprise to find in this little Pecos Town of adobe huts set down higgledy-piggledy a tiny stone church with stained glass windows, a little gem in a wilderness. I slipped through the doors and sat watching the sunset through the colored windows and dreaming of the devotees whose ideals had been built into the stones of these quiet walls. Three miles lower down the valley is a still older church built in--well, they tell you all the way from 1548 and 1600 to 1700. I dare say the middle date is the nearest right. At all events, the bronze bell of this old ruin dated before 1700; and when preparations were under way for the Chicago World's Fair, these old Mission bells were so much in demand that the prices went up to $500; and the Mexicans of Pecos were so fearful of the desecrating thief that they carried this ancient bell away and buried it in the mountains--where, no man knows: it has never since been found. You have been told so often that the mountains of America lack human and historic interest that you have almost come to believe it. Does all this sound like lack of human interest? Yet it is most of it 8,000 feet above sea level, and much of it on the top of the snow peaks between ten and thirteen thousand feet up. * * * * *