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in front of them was the main street. To the northeast stood the old military hospital, used now as a place of habitation and as a dance hall. Near it an excavation, left when earth had been taken to make adobe bricks for building purposes, had been filled with water and formed a little lake with grassy, flower-sprinkled shores. At the northern edge of town was a peach orchard, planted by the Indians and covering many acres. In the warm spring days, the orchard in full billowy bloom was like heavy, low-lying pink smoke from a fragrant censer, and in the summer it was a source of pies and cobblers for every housewife who cared to gather the ripened fruit.

But the glory of Fort Sumner was a broad, smooth avenue four miles long leading northward to the little Mexican village of Punta de la Glorietta and lined its entire length with twin rows of giant cottonwoods, thirty feet apart, that testified to the constructive labours of Indians under the urge of soldier bayonets. Shady and cool on the hottest days, this noble thoroughfare had on one side the bronze-red Pecos swishing noisily down from its mountain sources and on the other the fields and orchards of Mexican farmers. Mocking birds still sing in the towering branches of the survivors of these old trees that have seen pass beneath them, as along a king's highway, the pageantry of the frontier past—pioneers, Indians, soldiers of the old army, descendants of Spanish conquerors, Kit Carson, Billy the Kid and his outlaws, Pat Garrett and his man-hunters, John Chisum the cattle king, and the multitude of forgotten men who played their part in building civilization in the Southwest.

Billy the Kid made Fort Sumner his headquarters from the fall of 1878 until his death. Of the men who had followed him during the Lincoln County war, Charlie