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Ho! For old Fort Sumner. You set out gaily. Your fancy conjures up quaint pictures of the romantic old place. How does it look now? Is it the same as in old frontier days? You propose to ramble through the old home of Pete Maxwell and his sister, Paulita. You will see the room in which Billy the Kid was killed. You will stroll through the shady aisles of the old peach orchard. You will visit old Beaver Smith's former drink-parlour. You revel in pleasant anticipations.

From new Fort Sumner, the commonplace town by the railroad, your road leads south along the famous avenue of cottonwoods through irrigated farmlands. The avenue is still an avenue but there are woeful gaps in the twin rows of giant trees. Pecos Valley farmers care more for wheat, beans, potatoes, than for beauty. Where the old trees shut off the sunlight from their precious acres, they have chopped them down. Which in this treeless land seems a sort of crime.

"Under ditch, this land's worth two and three hundred dollars an acre," says Old Man Charlie Foor, your guide. "But where you can't get water on it, it ain't worth settin' a Mexican to plough it."