“Cracky!--Won’t it be some pickles to hunt with the old iron-man again, though! They say he did wonders in France,” cried Sid, all happy excitement over the prospects of going West again. “Sure did!” chuckled the Colonel. “There was a good story going around his regiment that they tell on Big John, boys. It seems they were in the middle of a charge, when someone yelled out--‘Hey--Big John!--shake off your bayonet--there’s three Boches dangling on it!’” “Reminds me of a dare-devil I had in my battery,” grinned Sid. “That fellow, a big, red-haired Maine man, was afraid of nothing! During our Argonne advance we had a battery assignment with one gun to go right under a tree. The Boches had left a bomb there dangling from a branch by a rope, so that if you took it down it would surely go off. Up comes Mike, as we all stood looking at it, figuring out how to get rid of the thing. ‘Lave me at ut!’ says he, brushing the rest aside, and before I could yell out a word he had ripped it loose--every one scattering right and left--and then he hurled it,--and the thing went off in mid-air and liked to have blown down our tree!” “Great times you boys must have had!” sighed the Colonel, “but fighting was not so damn devilish in my day. Glad it’s all over, and we can get back to the clean joys of hunting again! We’ll get our hats in Albuquerque--wait till you see ’em! A big Mex. sombrero, with a sugar-loaf crown and a brim a yard wide--unless things have changed from my old Apache days. And they don’t change, much, down there. New Mexico’s still half Spanish.” The boys realized that when, two weeks later, their transcontinental bade good-by to Colorado at Spanish Peaks and dropped down the old Santa Fe trail into New Mexico. Mesas, Indian pueblos still inhabited, and little Mexican ’dobe villages greeted them on every hand, keeping the boys continually crossing to opposite windows of their Pullman to stare out. This was not the old U. S. at all! It just couldn’t be! As the train climbed the grade toward Arizona, the country grew wilder and more desolate. Navaho and Zuni Indians came down to the stations to trade baskets and pottery; the pueblo of Laguna rose close at hand; the high rock of Acoma, whose pueblo has defied the conqueror for centuries, was to be seen, dim and misty, down a bare valley. They saw a great natural bridge carved by water out of the solid cliff, and then, high above, the train passed those remarkable carved and pinnacled buttes called Navaho Church, as the tracks dipped down-grade again, to follow the winding valley of the Puercos into Arizona. Bare and desolate and empty and dry was that stream bed, with frightful bad lands rising across the river to the rim of a high plateau, fringed with scraggy timber.