The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On
by Eugene Manlove Rhodes

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Title: The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On

Author: Eugene Manlove Rhodes

Release Date: April 8, 2004 [EBook #11960]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE DESIRE OF THE MOTH AND THE COME ON

BY EUGENE MANLOVE RHODES

ILLUSTRATIONS BY H.T. DUNN

ILLUSTRATIONS

They were riding hard

"Gentlemen--be seated!"

THE DESIRE OF THE MOTH

Chapter I

_"Little Next Door--her years are few--
Loves me, more than her elders do;
Says, my wrinkles become me so;
Marvels much at the tales I know.
Says, we shall marry when she is grown----"_

The little happy song stopped short. John Wesley Pringle, at the
mesa's last headland, drew rein to adjust his geography. This was new
country to him.

Close behind, Organ Mountain flung up a fantasy of spires,
needle-sharp and bare and golden. The long straight range--saw-toothed
limestone save for this twenty-mile sheer upheaval of the
Organ--stretched away to north and south against the unclouded sky,
till distance turned the barren gray to blue-black, to blue, to misty
haze; till the sharp, square-angled masses rounded to hillocks--to a
blur--a wavy line--nothing.

More than a hundred miles to the north-west, two midget mountains
wavered in the sky. John Wesley nodded at their unforgotten shapes and
pieced this vast landscape to the patchwork map in his head. Those toy
hills were San Mateo and Magdalena. Pringle had passed that way on a
bygone year, headed east. He was going west, now.

"I'm too prosperous here," he had explained to Beebe and Ballinger,
his partners on Rainbow. "I'm tedious to myself. Guess I'll take a
_pasear_ back to Prescott. Railroad? Who, me? Why, son, I like to
travel when I go anywheres. Just starting and arriving don't delight
me any. Besides, I don't know that strip along the border. I'll ride."

It was a tidy step to Prescott--say, as far as from Philadelphia to
Savannah, or from