ut, 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 welc