In this I loitered by day pouring over old scraps of history, and at night I would leave the hotel to stand in the Plaza, listening to the whispering winds and voices out of the past.

It was at Santa Fe that I learned of Dacombo, who, so far as I can learn, was the first white man to visit America's valley of the Nile. With an introductory note from Don Juan Jaquez I met Don Sol Luna, then republican national committeeman, but who is now passed, and asked him if he knew any stories of the first Spanish invasion of the north. I asked him about the Padres and Dacombo. He knew little of them in an historical way, but he remembered one person of that name residing along the trail from Raton to Taos, of which I made note. Then I visited Taos, going in over the Cimmaron desert.

About twenty-five miles east of Taos, near the summit of the continental divide, is a lonely hut and when I went to Taos, I paused there for refreshments, and also because Senor Sol Luna had given me a token of introduction to Miguel Dacombo; and here it was that he, knowing of my desire, sat squat upon the ground, and with a stick sketched crudely in the sand, after the manner of story tellers and tradition men of the southwest. And this is the story imperfectly told in broken English, as it had come to him through fourteen generations of ancestry: