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.
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