Lippincotts Magazine, October 1885 | Page 3

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