A Texas Matchmaker | Page 2

for a man in middle life. Over six feet in height,
with a rugged constitution, he little felt his threescore years, having
spent his entire lifetime in the outdoor occupation of a ranchman.
Living on the wild game of the country, sleeping on the ground by a
camp-fire when his work required it, as much at home in the saddle as
by his ranch fireside, he was a romantic type of the strenuous pioneer.

He was a man of simple tastes, true as tested steel in his friendships,
with a simple honest mind which followed truth and right as unerringly
as gravitation. In his domestic affairs, however, he was unfortunate.
The year after locating at Las Palomas, he had returned to his former
home on the Colorado River, where he had married Mary Bryan, also
of the family of Austin's colonists. Hopeful and happy they returned to
their new home on the Nueces, but before the first anniversary of their
wedding day arrived, she, with her first born, were laid in the same
grave. But grief does not kill, and the young husband bore his loss as
brave men do in living out their allotted day. But to the hour of his
death the memory of Mary Bryan mellowed him into a child, and, when
unoccupied, with every recurring thought of her or the mere mention of
her name, he would fall into deep reverie, lasting sometimes for hours.
And although he contracted two marriages afterward, they were simply
marriages of convenience, to which, after their termination, he
frequently referred flippantly, sometimes with irreverence, for they
were unhappy alliances.
On my arrival at Las Palomas, the only white woman on the ranch was
"Miss Jean," a spinster sister of its owner, and twenty years his junior.
After his third bitter experience in the lottery of matrimony, evidently
he gave up hope, and induced his sister to come out and preside as the
mistress of Las Palomas. She was not tall like her brother, but rather
plump for her forty years. She had large gray eyes, with long black
eyelashes, and she had a trick of looking out from under them which
was both provoking and disconcerting, and no doubt many an admirer
had been deceived by those same roguish, laughing eyes. Every man,
Mexican and child on the ranch was the devoted courtier of Miss Jean,
for she was a lovable woman; and in spite of her isolated life and the
constant plaguings of her brother on being a spinster, she fitted neatly
into our pastoral life. It was these teasings of her brother that gave me
my first inkling that the old ranchero was a wily matchmaker, though
he religiously denied every such accusation. With a remarkable
complacency, Jean Lovelace met and parried her tormentor, but her
brother never tired of his hobby while there was a third person to listen.
Though an unlettered man, Lance Lovelace had been a close observer

of humanity. The big book of Life had been open always before him,
and he had profited from its pages. With my advent at Las Palomas,
there were less than half a dozen books on the ranch, among them a
copy of Bret Harte's poems and a large Bible.
"That book alone," said he to several of us one chilly evening, as we sat
around the open fireplace, "is the greatest treatise on humanity ever
written. Go with me to-day to any city in any country in Christendom,
and I'll show you a man walk up the steps of his church on Sunday who
thanks God that he's better than his neighbor. But you needn't go so far
if you don't want to. I reckon if I could see myself, I might show
symptoms of it occasionally. Sis here thanks God daily that she is
better than that Barnes girl who cut her out of Amos Alexander. Now,
don't you deny it, for you know it's gospel truth! And that book is
reliable on lots of other things. Take marriage, for instance. It is just as
natural for men and women to mate at the proper time, as it is for steers
to shed in the spring. But there's no necessity of making all this fuss
about it. The Bible way discounts all these modern methods. 'He took
unto himself a wife' is the way it describes such events. But now such
an occurrence has to be announced, months in advance. And after the
wedding is over, in less than a year sometimes, they are glad to sneak
off and get the bond dissolved in some divorce court, like I did with my
second wife."
All of us about the ranch, including Miss Jean, knew that the old
ranchero's views on matrimony could be obtained by leading up to