--BERTON BRALEY.

"Just round the block" is a phrase familiar to you. To get the same
effect in the open country you would say "thirty miles" or sixty;
and in those miles it is likely there would be no water and no
house--perhaps not any tree. Consider now: Within the borders of New
Mexico might be poured New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland,
Delaware. Then drop in another small state and all of Chesapeake Bay,
and still New Mexico would not be brimful--though it would have to
be carried carefully to avoid slopping over. Scattered across this
country is a population less than that of Buffalo--half of it
clustered in six-mile ribbons along the Rio Grande and the Pecos.
Those figures are for to-day. Divide them by three, and then excuse
the story if it steps round the block. It was long ago; Plancus was
consul then.

Some two weeks after the day when Johnny Dines went to horse camp,
Charlie See rode northward through the golden September; northward
from Rincon, pocket of that billiard table you know of. His way was
east of the Rio Grande, in the desperate twisting country where the
river cuts through Caballo Mountains. His home was beyond the river,
below Rincon, behind Cerro Roblado and Selden Hill; and he rode for a
reason he had. Not for the first time; at every farm and clearing he
was hailed with greeting and jest.

Across the river he saw the yellow walls of Colorado, of old Fort
Thorne, deserted Santa Barbara. He came abreast of them, left them
behind, came to Wit's End, where the river gnaws at the long bare
ridges and the wagon road clings and clambers along the brown
hillside. He rode sidewise and swaying, crooning a gay little saddle
song; to which Stargazer, his horse, twitched back an inquiring ear.

_Oh, there was a crooked man and he rode a crooked mile_----

Charlie See was as straight as his own rifle; it was the road he
traveled which prompted that joyful saddle song. As will be found upon
examination, that roistering ditty sorts with a joyful jog trot. It
follows that Charlie See was not riding at a run, as frontiersmen do
in the movies. It is a great and neglected truth that frontiersmen on
the frontier never ride like the frontiersmen in films. And it may be
mentioned in passing that frontiersmen on frontiers never do anything
at all resembling as to motive, method or result those things which
frontiersmen do in films. And that is the truth.