The village was the chief, indeed, wellnigh the only, town of a great west-by-north county, in which Rhode Island would be lost and Massachusetts find elbow-room.  It was an irregular little bunch of buildings gathered along an arterial street which, after a run of three hundred yards or so, broke to pieces and scattered its dispersed shanties about a high, barren plain.  It stood on the steep bank of a little river, and over against it, on a naked hill, was Uncle Sam’s military village,—­a fort by courtesy,—­where, when not sleeping, black soldiers and white strolled about in the warm sun.  When the little street was fairly awake, it presented a very lively appearance and had the air of doing a great deal of business.  The wan houses emitted their occupants, and numerous pink-faced riders, in leathers and broad hats, poured in from all sides, and, tying their heavily-accoutred ponies, disappeared into the shops with a sort of bow-legged waddle, like sailors ashore.  Off his horse, the cow-boy is frankly awkward.  Purchases made, they departed with a rush, filling the glare with dust.  Officers from the post, with cork helmets and white trousers, came across the river and stood in the broad shadows of adobe door-ways, gaping, and switching their legs with bamboo canes.  “It’s magnificent,” one seemed to hear them mutter, “but it isn’t war!” Groups of Mexicans stood about, or, selecting a white wall, leaned against it, as they are apt to do at home, for the better relief of their swarthy faces and brilliant scarfs; and slowly moving down the street, stopping occasionally to speak to the various clusters of men, there went the beneficent if somewhat untidy figure of the Catholic father, in whose company we had breakfasted, a fat, jolly, anecdotal inheritor of the mantle of some founder of the Missions.  The sun took absolute and merciless possession of the street.  You put your hand in your pocket for the smoked glass through which you observed the last eclipse.  Everything seemed bleached,—­the white buildings, the yellow road, the eyebrows of the cow-boys.

We did the drive of twenty miles to the ranch in a canvas-topped buggy, drawn by a pair of devil-may-care little nags, who took us across dry arroyos and the rocky beds of running streams in a style that promised to make sticks of the vehicle.  It held good, however, and rattled out a sort of derisive snicker at every fresh attempt to shiver it.  The country through which we passed afforded views of superb breadth and a most interesting and delightful quality.  No landscape has in the exact sense such charm as one in which Nature manifests herself in a large and simple way:  one feels with a thrill that she is about to tell the secret.  The earth lay almost in its nakedness beneath the inane dome of the sky.  But over the large simplicity of form one was soon aware of an exquisite play of hues.  The easy undulations, as they ran off to the unattainable horizon, were so many waves of delicate and varying color.