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ican ploughing or spading in a garden. Such discoveries are so numerous they pass almost without comment. "José Castro ploughed up a skull in his corn patch to-day." "Juan Silva dug up a thigh bone while hoeing his onions." Humph! That is all. And graves seem to be everywhere, their sites vaguely known.

"There is some man buried over there in the corner of my front yard," says Mrs. Lena Morgan, mine hostess of Bonito Inn. "Who? Oh, I haven't the slightest idea. I don't know the exact spot. Somewhere near that clump of rose bushes. But that's nothing. There are three or four more graves out in the orchard."

It taxes the imagination to-day to picture Lincoln as the alive, bustling mart it was fifty years ago. The village went to sleep at the close of the Lincoln County war and has never awakened again. It is still at its nap in its pleasant cañon, dreaming, perhaps, of the crimson past. If a railroad never comes to link it with the far-away world, it may slumber on for a thousand years.

You will find Lincoln now just as it was when Murphy and McSween and Billy the Kid knew it. The village is an anachronism; a sort of mummy town looking as if it had been as carefully embalmed as some old Pharaoh, to preserve for modern eyes a meticulously vivid picture of the frontier past of a half century ago.

A winding country road serves as its single street, once a mile of tragedies. Its three hundred people, mostly Mexicans, live in quaint adobe houses. There are no side-walks, no electric lights, no piped water. Old-fashioned kerosene lamps and candles burn in the homes at night. Frugal housewives set tubs to catch foaming streams guttering from the roofs when it rains. Murphy's old store is weather-stained and dilapidated, its outer plastering crum-