Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Leah Moser and PG Distributed Proofreaders
They were riding hard
"Gentlemen—be seated!"
"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 themesa's last headland, drew rein to adjust his geography. This was newcountry to him.
Close behind, Organ Mountain flung up a fantasy of spires,needle-sharp and bare and golden. The long straight range—saw-toothedlimestone save for this twenty-mile sheer upheaval of theOrgan—stretched away to north and south against the unclouded sky,till distance turned the barren gray to blue-black, to blue, to mistyhaze; till the sharp, square-angled masses rounded to hillocks—to ablur—a wavy line—nothing.
More than a hundred miles to the north-west, two midget mountainswavered in the sky. John Wesley nodded at their unforgotten shapes andpieced this vast landscape to the patchwork map in his head. Those toyhills were San Mateo and Magdalena. Pringle had passed that way on abygone 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 apasear back to Prescott. Railroad? Who, me? Why, son, I like totravel when I go anywheres. Just starting and arriving don't delightme 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 toSavannah, or from Richmond to Augusta; but John Wesley had made manysuch rides in the Odyssey of his wonder years. Some of them had beenmade in haste. But there was no haste now. Sam Bass, his corn-fedsorrel, was hardly less sleek and sturdy than at the start, thougha third of the way was behind him. Pringle rode by easy stages, andwhere he found himself pleased, there he tarried for a space.
With another friendly nod to the northward hills that marked a day ofhis past, Pringle turned his eyes to the westlands, outspread and vastbefore him. To his right the desert stretched away, a mighty plaindotted with low hills, rimmed with a curving, jagged range. Beyondthat range was a nothingness, a hiatus that marked the sunken valleyof the Rio Grande; beyond that, a headlong infinity of unknown ranges,tier on tier, yellow or brown or blue; broken, tumbled, huddled,scattered, with gulfs between to tell of unseen plains and hiddenhappy valleys—altogether giving an impression of rushing toward him,resistless, like the waves of a stormy sea.
At his feet the plain broke away sharply, in a series of steplikesandy benches, to where the Rio Grande bore quartering across thedesert, turning to the Mexican sea; the Mesilla Valley here, a slenderribbon of mossy green, broidered with loops of flashing river—aribbon six miles by forty, orchard, woodland, and green field, greenerfor the desolate gray desert beyond and the yellow hills of sandedging the valley floor. Below him Las Uvas, chief town of the valley,lay basking in the sun, tiny square and street bordered w