A black limousine pulled up. A limousine, in the wilderness. Mara clinched her hands, grinning. “Is that for us, Mother?”

The man who appeared from the driver’s side stood in stark contrast to the cowboy who had stumbled from the saloon. In a gray tailored suit and hat, he resembled more closely the kind of men Mara saw in the city, his russet hair cropped close to his head. He moved with purpose, strutting around the limousine toward Mara and her mother on the platform. He said he would be taking them up to the Hill.

“What’s the Hill?” Mara asked offhandedly, not looking up from her sketchbook, where she was now furiously drawing the driver.

He flicked his cigarette to the ground, ignoring her.

No one spoke as the car pitched steadily higher, bumping over rocks and sinking into depressions in the dusty road. Terracotta-colored ranch houses mottled the rawhide landscape, along with black-and-white grazing cattle. Finally, a sign: Santa Fe. Her mother had read aloud from the WPA book: a long-established artist’s colony where the elite and wealthy afflicted with respiratory illness had been going for treatment for a decade. The clear mountain air and artistic diversion offered at the sanitariums surrounding Santa Fe were highly touted, according to the book.

The GI cleared his throat, explained, “We need to stop briefly in Santa Fe to obtain your badges before we can proceed up to the Hill. No one is allowed entry without a security badge.”

“Is the Hill much farther?” her father asked, his tone surprised.

“Another thirty-five miles or so,” the driver answered.

Sprawling beyond the clusters of flat, rectangular adobe houses lining the unpaved streets, a kind of Bohemian culture emerged as they entered the Plaza. Among red strings of wrinkled chilies, elderly Native Americans with sunbaked faces hawked their pottery, turquoise jewelry, and other handcrafted wares on blanketed sidewalks in the storefronts of curio shops and cafés. Women wore velvet skirts and peasant blouses, clinking silver belts slung low around their waists, and crescent pendants. Mara found them beautiful. The men ambled through the streets, smoking cigarettes and stubbing them out on the dirt. They wore jeans, button-down flannels, and cowboy hats like the rancher outside the bar in Lamy. The car stopped in front of a hollyhock-entwined patio, adobe bricks showing through the plaster, a wrought-iron gateway, halfway concealing a small sign with red lettering:

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