Lippincotts Magazine, October 1885 | Page 2

and stood in the broad shadows of adobe door-ways, gaping, and switching their legs with bamboo canes. "It's magnificent," one seemed to hear them mutter, "but it isn't war!" Groups of Mexicans stood about, or, selecting a white wall, leaned against it, as they are apt to do at home, for the better relief of their swarthy faces and brilliant scarfs; and slowly moving down the street, stopping occasionally to speak to the various clusters of men, there went the beneficent if somewhat untidy figure of the Catholic father, in whose company we had breakfasted, a fat, jolly, anecdotal inheritor of the mantle of some founder of the Missions. The sun took absolute and merciless possession of the street. You put your hand in your pocket for the smoked glass through which you observed the last eclipse. Everything seemed bleached,--the white buildings, the yellow road, the eyebrows of the cow-boys.
We did the drive of twenty miles to the ranch in a canvas-topped buggy, drawn by a pair of devil-may-care little nags, who took us across dry arroyos and the rocky beds of running streams in a style that promised to make sticks of the vehicle. It held good, however, and rattled out a sort of derisive snicker at every fresh attempt to shiver it. The country through which we passed afforded views of superb breadth and a most interesting and delightful quality. No landscape has in the exact sense such charm as one in which Nature manifests herself in a large and simple way: one feels with a thrill that she is about to tell the secret. The earth lay almost in its nakedness beneath the inane dome of the sky. But over the large simplicity of form one was soon aware of an exquisite play of hues. The easy undulations, as they ran off to the unattainable horizon, were so many waves of delicate and varying color. There were great sweeps of ochre, of gray, of fresh, light green, pointed with black dots of live-oak, and traversed by tortuous lines of indigo where the pecan treed creeks pursued their foiled courses, and troops of little hills grouped themselves about,--pink, pinkish, purple, purpling blue, white, as they faded from view like the evanescent cherubs in the corner of an old master. The hills, however, were little only because the stretch was so vast; it was really a broad plafond upon which they had solemnly entered to dance a minuet with the playful shadows of the clouds. The sky possessed everything. There was so much of it that existence seemed to have become in a sense a celestial--or at least an aerial--affair: the world was your balloon.
After the third creek-crossing the road ran straight as an avenue through a broad, level reach, and we flew along gayly. The little mesquite-trees, prim, dainty, and delicate, stood about in seeming order, civilizing the landscape and giving it the air of an orchard; the 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-a-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.