Bill presented us at the end of a week with a sadder but wiser car, a little wheezy and water-logged, but still game. When we steered it out of the garage which had become our second home in Santa Fe, we did not say good-by to Bill. We couldn’t afford to. On reaching Albuquerque safely, we sent him a postcard. “Dear Bill:--The car went beautifully. We wish we could take you with us!” CHAPTER XV LAGUNA AND ACOMA In spite of Toby’s making the slight error of driving fourteen miles with the emergency brake on, we seemed to have placed misadventure behind us for a brief season at least. We coasted the twenty-three switch backs of La Bajada hill, now an old story, and returned for the night to the Harvey hotel at Albuquerque, where the transcontinental traveler gets his first notion of Western heat, and wonders if he is in any danger from the aborigines selling pottery on the railroad platforms, and speculates as to whether the legs of the squaws can possibly fill the thick buckskin leggins they parade in so nonchalantly. If it is his first visit West, he little realizes how Harveyized these picturesque creatures have become, and he snatches eagerly at what he thinks may be his last chance to pick up some curios. The pottery, from the village of Acoma, is genuine, though of a tourist quality. The white doeskin legs are also genuine, although many pueblo women have ceased to wear them except to meet the twelve o’clock. They always inspire in me an awed respect, worn under the burning sun with such _sang froid_. The explanation for this indifference to discomfort lies in the fact that a lady’s social prominence is gaged by the number of doeskin wrappers she displays, as the Breton peasant is measured by her heavy petticoats, and a Maori belle by her tattooing: _il faut souffrir pour être belle_.