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The cliff, on the east side of the level plain, is bold and mountainous, rising from fifteen hundred to two thousand feet high, while on the west side the valley is bordered with the mesa formation in two benches, one rising back of the other, and both as level as a floor, with the highlands forming the divide between the Animas and La Plata Rivers in the distance.
Familiar as yesterday were the bogholes, where he and his partner what was that cow-puncher's name? had spent so many toilsome days and nights. Pan made camp on the rocky ford where a brook joined the Limestone. It was thirty miles to Littleton, farther to Las Animas, and his pack horse was tired.
The place was two hundred and sixty miles north of Santa Fe, on the north bank of the Arkansas River, fourteen miles above the mouth of the Purgatory River, or about half way between the towns of La Junta and Las Animas in present southeastern Colorado. One branch, the Mountain Branch, of the Santa Fe Trail, led up the Arkansas, to it, and on, to turn south across the Raton Mountain for Santa Fe.
At the present day, not a single Indian, either civilized or wild, exists in this part of the province; nor am I aware that the former inhabitants have left behind them any more permanent records than these insignificant piles on the summit of the Sierra de las Animas. The general, and almost entire absence of trees in Banda Oriental is remarkable.
Now the outriders dragged their rifles from the sheaths but while they were seeking to line their sights on the murderer the rustlers opened fire on them. Those cow-thieves of the Animas were good shots; the range was brief.
But Americo-Spaniards keep alive the tradition, and the prayers of many have ascended and do ascend for the succor of those who vanished so strangely in the valley of Las Animas.
By way of illustration, here is a sample game report, from Las Animas, Colorado, Feb. 22, 1912: "After the most severe winter weather experienced for twenty years we are able to compute approximately our loss of feathered life. It is seventy-five per cent of the quail throughout the irrigated district, and about twenty per cent of meadow-larks.
On particular days it is taken out and hung up in the church, and little would a stranger, ignorant of the language, guess the tremendous meaning of that commonplace appearance. On these boards is written 'Hoy se sacan animas, 'This day, souls are taken out of purgatory. It is an intimation to every one with a friend in distress that now is his time.
The fortifications of Havana were carefully covered in the military notes, and thus enumerated: There are fifteen fortifications in and about the city of Havana, more or less armed and garrisoned, besides a work partly constructed and not armed, called Las Animas, and the old bastions along the sea wall of the harbor.
Near Pan de Azucar, a landmark well known to all those who have sailed up the Plata, I stayed a day at the house of a most hospitable old Spaniard. Early in the morning we ascended the Sierra de las Animas. By the aid of the rising sun the scenery was almost picturesque.
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