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 Richmond to Augusta; but John Wesley had made many such rides in the Odyssey of his wonder years.  Some of them had been made in haste.  But there was no haste now.  Sam Bass, his corn-fed sorrel, was hardly less sleek and sturdy than at the start, though a third of the way was behind him.  Pringle rode by easy stages, and where he found himself pleased, there he tarried for a space.

With another friendly nod to the northward hills that marked a day of his past, Pringle turned his eyes to the westlands, outspread and vast before him.  To his right the desert stretched away, a mighty plain dotted with low hills, rimmed with a curving, jagged range.  Beyond that range was a nothingness, a hiatus that marked the sunken valley of 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 hidden happy valleys—­altogether giving an impression of rushing toward him, resistless, like the waves of a stormy sea.