“About how many, George?”

“Don’t know.”

“How many?”

“’Well, p’r’aps three thousand head,” says George, reflecting.  “We don’t know, takes five men to look ’em up and keep run.”

“What are they worth?”

“About thirty dollars a head.”

I make a rapid calculation, and look my astonishment at the laughing George.  Perhaps a recollection of the domestic economy of the Tryan household is expressed in that look, for George averts his eye and says, apologetically: 

“I’ve tried to get the old man to sell and build, but you know he says it ain’t no use to settle down, just yet.  We must keep movin’.  In fact, he built the shanty for that purpose, lest titles should fall through, and we’d have to get up and move stakes further down.”

Suddenly his quick eye detects some unusual sight in a herd we are passing, and with an exclamation he puts his roan into the center of the mass.  I follow, or rather Chu Chu darts after the roan, and in a few moments we are in the midst of apparently inextricable horns and hoofs.  “Toro!” shouts George, with vaquero enthusiasm, and the band opens a way for the swinging riata.  I can feel their steaming breaths, and their spume is cast on Chu Chu’s quivering flank.

Wild, devilish-looking beasts are they; not such shapes as Jove might have chosen to woo a goddess, nor such as peacefully range the downs of Devon, but lean and hungry Cassius-like bovines, economically got up to meet the exigencies of a six months’ rainless climate, and accustomed to wrestle with the distracting wind and the blinding dust.

“That’s not our brand,” says George; “they’re strange stock,” and he points to what my scientific eye recognizes as the astrological sign of Venus deeply seared in the brown flanks of the bull he is chasing.  But the herd are closing round us with low mutterings, and George has again recourse to the authoritative “Toro,” and with swinging riata divides the “bossy bucklers” on either side.  When we are free, and breathing somewhat more easily, I venture to ask George if they ever attack anyone.

“Never horsemen—­sometimes footmen.  Not through rage, you know, but curiosity.  They think a man and his horse are one, and if they meet a chap afoot, they run him down and trample him under hoof, in the pursuit of knowledge.  But,” adds George, “here’s the lower bench of the foothills, and here’s Altascar’s corral, and that White building you see yonder is the casa.”

A whitewashed wall enclosed a court containing another adobe building, baked with the solar beams of many summers.  Leaving our horses in the charge of a few peons in the courtyard, who were basking lazily in the sun, we entered a low doorway, where a deep shadow and an agreeable coolness fell upon us, as sudden and grateful as a plunge in cool water, from its contrast with the external glare and heat.  In the center of a low-ceiled apartment sat an old man with a black-silk handkerchief tied about his head, the few gray hairs that escaped from its folds relieving his gamboge-colored face.  The odor of CIGARRITOS was as incense added to the cathedral gloom of the building.