eless 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, ain'