What we planned to do was harder and less usual. We would follow the old trails, immigrant trails, cattle trails, traders’ routes,--mountain roads which a long procession of cliff dwellers, Spanish friars, gold seekers, Apache marauders, prospectors, Mormons and scouts had trod in five centuries, and left as they found them, mere footprints in the dust. The Southwest has been explored afoot and on horse, by prairie schooners, burro, and locomotive; the modern pioneer rattles his weather beaten flivver on business between Gallup and Santa Fe, Tucson and El Paso, and thinks nothing of it, but the country is still new to the motoring tourist. Because a car must have the attributes of a hurdler and a tightrope walker, be amphibious and fool-proof, have a beagle’s nose for half-obliterated tracks, thrill to the tug of sand and mud, and own a constitution strong enough to withstand all experiments of provincial garage-men, few merciful car owners will put it through the supreme agony. Had not the roads looked so smooth on the map we wouldn’t have tried them ourselves. And then, in New York, we met another optimist, and two and one make three. It was not until long afterward, when we met the roads he described as passable, that we discovered he was an optimist. He had motored through every section of the West, and paid us the compliment of believing we could do the same. When he presented us with our elaborate and beautiful itinerary he asked no questions about our skill and courage. He told us to buy an axe and a shovel, and carry a rope. A tent he advised as well, and such babes in the woods were we, the idea had not occurred to us. “And carry a pistol?” asked Toby, eagerly. “Never! You will be as safe--or safer than you are in New York City.” Toby was disappointed, but I heard him with relief. By nature gun-shy, I have seen too many war-dramas not to know that a pistol never shoots the person originally aimed at. The procedure never varies. A pulls a gun, points it at B. B, unflinching, engages A in light conversation. Diverted, A absent-mindedly puts down the gun, which B picks up, shooting to kill. I realized that as B my chances were better than as A, for while I would surely fall under the spell of a western outlaw’s quaint humor and racy diction and thus hand over the weapon into his keeping, the chances were that he might be equally undermined by our Boston r’s, and the appeal to his rough Western chivalry which we intended to make. Toby held out for an ammonia pistol. We did debate this for a while, but in the excitement of buying our tent we forgot the pistol entirely.