inen, and dust-colored canvas
shoes made up the outer man of a personality as distinctly unmilitary
as it was ponderous. Slow and labored in movement, the major was
correspondingly sluggish in speech. He sauntered out into the glare of
the evening sunshine and became slowly conscious of a desire to swear
at what he saw: that, though in a minute or two the day-god would
"douse his glim" behind the black horizon, no preparation whatever had
been made for a start. There stood the ambulance, every bolt and link
and tire hot as a stove-lid, but not a mule in sight. Turning to his
left, he strolled along towards a gap in the adobe wall, and entered
the dusty interior of the corral. One of the four quadrupeds drowsing
under the brush shelter languidly turned an inquiring eye and
interrogative ear in his direction, and conveyed, after the manner of
the mule, a suggestion as to supper. A Mexican boy sprawling in the
shade of a bale of government hay, and clad in cotton shirt and
trousers well-nigh as brown as the skin that peeped through occasional
gaps, glanced up at him with languid interest an instant, and then
resumed the more agreeable contemplation of the writhings of an
impaled tarantula. Under another section of the shed two placid little
burros were dreamily blinking at vacancy, their grizzled fronts
expressive of that ineffable peace found only in the faces of saints
and donkeys. In the middle of the enclosure a rude windlass coiled
with rope stood stretching forth a decrepit lever-arm. The
whippletree, dangling from the end over the beaten circular track,
seemed cracked with heat and age. The stout rope that stretched tautly
from the coil passed over a wooden wheel, and disappeared through a
broad-framed aperture into the bowels of the earth. Close at hand in
the shade of a brush-covered "leanto" hung three or four huge _ollas_,
earthen water-jars, swathed in gunny sack and blanket. Beyond them,
warped out of all possibility of future usefulness, stood what had
once been the running gear of a California buck-board. Behind it
dangled from dusty pegs portions of leather harness, which all the
neat's-foot oil of the military pharmacopoeia could never again
restore to softness or pliability. A newer edition of the same class
of vehicle was covered by a canvas "'paulin." A huge stack of barley
bags was piled at the far end of the corral, guarded from depredation
(quadrupedal) by a barrier of wooden slats, mostly down, and b