The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Border Ruffian, by Thomas A. Janvier

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Title: A Border Ruffian
1891

Author: Thomas A. Janvier

Release Date: December 10, 2007 [EBook #23803]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A BORDER RUFFIAN ***

Produced by David Widger

A BORDER RUFFIAN.

By Thomas A. Janvier

Copyright, 1891, by Harper & Brothers

I.--WEST.

_The Incident of the Boston Young Lady, the Commercial Traveller, and
the Desperado._

I.

Throughout the whole of the habitable globe there nowhere is to be found
more delightful or more invigorating air than that which every traveller
through New Mexico, from Albuquerque, past Las Vegas, to the Raton
Mountains, is free to breathe.

Miss Grace Winthrop, of Boston, and also Miss Winthrop, her paternal
aunt, and also Mr. Hutchinson Port, of Philadelphia, her maternal
uncle--all of whom were but forty hours removed from the Alkali Desert
west of the Continental Divide--felt in the very depths of their several
beings how entirely good this air was; and, as their several natures
moved them, they betrayed their lively appreciation of its excellence.

Miss Grace Winthrop, having contrived for herself, with the intelligent
assistance of the porter, a most comfortable nest of pillows, suffered
her novel to remain forgotten upon her knees; and, as she leaned her
pretty blond head against the wood-work separating her section from that
adjoining it, looked out upon the brown mountains, and accorded to those
largely-grand objects of nature the rare privilege of being reflected
upon the retina of her very blue eyes. Yet the mountains could not
flatter themselves with the conviction that contemplation of them wholly
filled her mind, for occasionally she smiled a most delightful smile.

Miss Winthrop, retired from the gaze of the world in the cell that the
Pullman-car people euphemistically style a state-room, ignored all such
casual excrescences upon the face of nature as mountains, and seriously
read her morning chapter of Emerson.

Mr. Hutchinson Port, lulled by the easy, jog-trot motion of the car,
and soothed by the air fro