Hearts Desire | Page 2

Better_

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Frontispiece: "He looked up--to see her standing at his door!"
"'The umpire decides that you've got to check your guns during the
game.'"
"A voice which sang of a face that was the fairest, and of a dark blue
eye."
"'Something has got to be did, and did mighty blame quick.'"

HEART'S DESIRE

CHAPTER I
THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE
_This being in Part the Story of Curly, the Can of Oysters, and the Girl
from Kansas_
"It looks a long ways acrost from here to the States," said Curly, as we
pulled up our horses at the top of the Capitan divide. We gazed out
over a vast, rolling sea of red-brown earth which stretched far beyond
and below the nearer foothills, black with their growth of stunted pines.
This was a favorite pausing place of all travellers between the
county-seat and Heart's Desire; partly because it was a summit reached
only after a long climb from either side of the divide; partly, perhaps,
because it was a notable view-point in a land full of noble views. Again,
it may have been a customary tarrying point because of some vague
feeling shared by most travellers who crossed this trail,--the same

feeling which made Curly, hardened citizen as he was of the land west
of the Pecos, turn a speculative eye eastward across the plains. We
could not see even so far as the Pecos, though it seemed from our lofty
situation that we looked quite to the ultimate, searching the utter ends
of all the earth.
"Yours is up that-a-way;" Curly pointed to the northeast. "Mine was
that-a-way." He shifted his leg in the saddle as he turned to the right
and swept a comprehensive hand toward the east, meaning perhaps
Texas, perhaps a series of wild frontiers west of the Lone Star state. I
noticed the nice distinction in Curly's tenses. He knew the man more
recently arrived west of the Pecos, possibly later to prove a backslider.
As for himself, Curly knew that he would never return to his wild East;
yet it may have been that he had just a touch of the home feeling which
is so hard to lose, even in a homeless country, a man's country pure and
simple, as was surely this which now stretched wide about us.
Somewhere off to the east, miles and miles beyond the red sea of sand
and grama grass, lay Home.
"And yet," said Curly, taking up in speech my unspoken thought, "you
can't see even halfway to Vegas up there." No. It was a long two
hundred miles to Las Vegas, long indeed in a freighting wagon, and
long enough even in the saddle and upon as good a horse as each of us
now bestrode. I nodded. "And it's some more'n two whoops and a
holler to my ole place," said he. Curly remained indefinite; for, though
presently he hummed something about the sun and its brightness in his
old Kentucky home, he followed it soon thereafter with musical
allusion to the Suwanee River. One might have guessed either
Kentucky or Georgia in regard to Curly, even had one not suspected
Texas from the look of his saddle cinches.
It was the day before Christmas. Yet there was little winter in this
sweet, thin air up on the Capitan divide. Off to the left the Patos
Mountains showed patches of snow, and the top of Carrizo was yet
whiter, and even a portion of the highest peak of the Capitans carried a
blanket of white; but all the lower levels were red-brown, calm,
complete, unchanging, like the whole aspect of this far-away and

finished country, whereto had come, long ago, many Spaniards in
search of wealth and dreams; and more recently certain Anglo-Saxons,
also dreaming, who sought in a stolen hiatus of the continental
conquest nothing of more value than a deep and sweet oblivion.
It was a Christmas-tide different enough from that of the States toward
which Curly pointed. We looked eastward, looked again, turned back
for one last look before we tightened the cinches and started down the
winding trail which led through the foothills along the flank of the
Patos Mountains, and so at last into the town of Heart's Desire.
"Lord!" said Curly, reminiscently, and quite without connection with
any thought which had been uttered. "Say, it was fine, wasn't it,
Christmas? We allus had firecrackers then. And eat! Why, man!" This
allusion to the firecrackers would have determined that Curly had come
from the South, which alone has a midwinter Fourth of July, possibly
because the populace is not content with only one annual smell of
gunpowder. "We had trees where I came from," said I. "And eat! Yes,
man!"
"Some different here now,