prairie-dog villages were thrown into a tumult of excitement by our passage; a chaparral-cock slipped out of a bush, stared an instant, pulled the string that lifts his tail and top-knot, and settled down for a race directly under the horses' feet. We passed the point of a hill, gained a slight rise, and the ranch was in sight. It must be confessed that it was not in appearance all that the name might imply,—not the sort of place for which one starts after having provided one's self with a navy revolver and a low estimate of the value of human life. It was, in fact, a very pretty and domestic scene, a little village of half a dozen buildings and a net-work of white limestone and brush corrals. Shortly I was supping in a neat little cottage, and endeavoring in the usual way to be agreeable to some one in muslin. In this modern world we change our skies, truly, but not—not our bric-à-brac. On the walls of the pretty dining-room one beheld with rising feeling one's old friends the Japanese fan and the discarded plate still clinging with the touching persistence of the ivy to the oak. To be sure, there was a tall half-breed Indian moving about with the silent agility of the warpath, but he wore a white apron, and his hideous intention was to fill one's wineglass. If the longitude had led me to meditate right buffalo's hump, "washed down" with something coarse and potent enough to justify the phrase, it was clear that I was painfully behind the stroke of the clock. Life, good lady, takes an undignified pleasure in arranging these petty shocks to the expectations, which we soon learn to dismiss with a smile. The cold mutton and ordinaire were excellent, and we had some coffee and a cigarette on the piazza. The sun was setting far away behind a hill on the other side of the creek. A soft sound came down the valley from a remote flock of sheep. A little breeze sprang up and ran tremulously about, shaking the tufted grass and the slim boughs of the mesquites, and putting some question with a wistfully hopeful swish. Plainly, one could be very much at home here. The visionary brunette had evidently ranged herself, was living down the reputation of early vivid experiences and successfully cultivating the domestic virtues.

II.

Six or eight years earlier, four young men had left New York on a Galveston steamer, their departure being attended by such an assemblage of young women that on the second day out their companions of the voyage confided the supposition that it had been a "bridal party." That little Spanish-American word ravaging our coasts and carrying off the pride of the youth has to answer for many such bridal parties, whose tours have been followed with pins and colored pencils and eyes more eager than those of mothers-in-law. In a month or so the young men had pitched a wall-tent within a day's ride of the Rio Grande, and were seriously occupied in sacrificing each other's feelings on the altar of experimental cookery, in herding sheep with the assistance of paper novels, and in writing exceedingly long letters to the North. This wall-tent was the larva of the ranch. But the arid southern country proved inconvenient, and collecting their effects in a prairie-schooner and driving their flocks before them, they effected a masterly change of base, which brought them two hundred miles to the northward and set them down in a delightful pasture-land, watered by three pretty creeks, near one of which they erected an adobe hut. This solitary house on a broad flat, an object of amazement to wandering hordes of cattle, was the ranch during a most interesting period, and its thatched roof and somewhat fetid walls became for the occupants overgrown with fine clusters of association. Within a few miles of its site the present village took shape.

The country was a frankly monotonous conformation of alternating hills and valleys,—"divides" and "draws,"—with wide flats near the creeks. Gulches, more or less deep, down the valley-lines of the draws, and traversing the flats to the creeks,—the so-called arroyos,—were a common physical feature. In the wet season they were running streams, but for most of the year they were dry, with here and there a waterhole, flowers and chaparral growing in them, and, at intervals, pecans. The pecan-trees grew thickly along the borders of the creeks, while the mesquites cloaked with gossamer wide portions of the flats; and here and there in the valleys and on the sides of the hills the sombre, self-enwrapped live-oaks stood about, like philosophers musing amid the general lightness. Spanish-dagger, bear-grass, and persimmon-bushes freckled the sides of the rocky divides with dark spots, and mistletoe hung its fine green globes like unillumined lanterns in the branches of the mesquites. Over the plains and slopes a sparse turf of various grasses, differing in color and changing with the season, gave the airy landscape its brilliant and versatile complexion. A dozen varieties of cactus, portulaccas, geraniums, petunias, verbenas, scattered over the prairie, morning-glories and sunflowers in the arroyos and along the creeks, and many a flower nameless to the general, abounded. So, it should be added, did in their season plover, snipe, ducks, and geese.

The business of the ranch was the antediluvian occupation of rearing and shearing sheep, and to that end the village included a shearing-shed and a large wool-house. Besides these there were three cottages and several other buildings, among which one called the "ranch-house" was the focus of the activity of the place, and, being also a survival from a comparatively early day, was a somewhat characteristic affair. It was a box-house, painted red, with a broad porch thatched with bear-grass, and a saddle-shed butting up against it. The interior, barring a little store at one end, was a single large room, bedroom, sitting-room, office, furnished with home-made tables with blankets for cloths, knocked-up chairs with cowhide seats and coyote-skin backs, deers' antlers draped with "slickers" (Texan for the 'longshoreman's yellow water-proof) and wide-brimmed "ten-dollar" hats, and at one end two tiers of bunks, with leather cases for six-shooters nailed to their sides. This room served for the abode of the storekeeper, for the transaction of business, and for the accommodation of the perennial casual guest. It was rude, but, especially of evenings about the lamp, it had a marked air of pipe-and-tobacco comfort.

The little store was patronized by the cow-boy, so much abused with sensational or picturesque intentions, and by the small farmers with irrigation patches in the vicinity. It was likewise the resort of Encarnacion and Tomas, and others their brethren, from the Mexican village a few miles up the creek, or from isolated abiding-places round about. Here they would come, and, rolling cigarettes of the brown paper they affect and the eleemosynary tobacco open on the counter, to which all were welcome (such were the amenities of shopping on the ranch), they would lounge about, ever smiling and chattering in soft voices, finally to say 'uenos dias with two bits' worth of bacon, or corn-meal, or pink candy for the chiquitas. Here, too, would come Tomasa, and, with even more than usual feminine zeal in matters of dress, at once try on the ready-made calico gown she purchased, while the store-keeper smoked his pipe and stroked his beard.

Excepting the cow-boys, the people composing the clientage of the store were for the most part resident in one of two farm-settlements located on the creek, about ten miles apart, one exclusively Mexican, the other almost entirely "white." Besides these, the families of many of the Mexican hands lived close by. These last were constantly assisting conversation at the cottages with such incidents as the following:

The cook—a tall, gaunt negro of a mediaevally "intense" nature—came in with an excited manner,