It was the day before Christmas.  Yet there was little winter in this sweet, thin air up on the Capitan divide.  Off to the left the Patos Mountains showed patches of snow, and the top of Carrizo was yet whiter, and even a portion of the highest peak of the Capitans carried a blanket of white; but all the lower levels were red-brown, calm, complete, unchanging, like the whole aspect of this far-away and finished country, whereto had come, long ago, many Spaniards in search of wealth and dreams; and more recently certain Anglo-Saxons, also dreaming, who sought in a stolen hiatus of the continental conquest nothing of more value than a deep and sweet oblivion.

It was a Christmas-tide different enough from that of the States toward which Curly pointed.  We looked eastward, looked again, turned back for one last look before we tightened the cinches and started down the winding trail which led through the foothills along the flank of the Patos Mountains, and so at last into the town of Heart’s Desire.

“Lord!” said Curly, reminiscently, and quite without connection with any thought which had been uttered.  “Say, it was fine, wasn’t it, Christmas?  We allus had firecrackers then.  And eat!  Why, man!” This allusion to the firecrackers would have determined that Curly had come from the South, which alone has a midwinter Fourth of July, possibly because the populace is not content with only one annual smell of gunpowder.  “We had trees where I came from,” said I.  “And eat!  Yes, man!”

“Some different here now, ain’t it?” said Curly, grinning; and I grinned in reply with what fortitude I could muster.  Down in Heart’s Desire there was a little, a very little cabin, with a bunk, a few blankets, a small table, and a box nailed against the wall for a cupboard.  I knew what was in the box, and what was not in it, and I so advised my friend as we slipped down off the bald summit of the Capitans and came into the shelter of the short, black pinons.  Curly rode on for a little while before he made answer.

“Why,” said he, at length, “ain’t you heard?  You’re in with our rodeo on Christmas dinner.  McKinney, and Tom Osby, and Dan Anderson, the other lawyer, and me,—­we’re going to have Christmas dinner at Andersen’s ’dobe in town to-morrer.  You’re in.  You mayn’t like it.  Don’t you mind.  The directions says to take it, and you take it.  It’s goin’ to be one of the largest events ever knowed in this here settlement.  Of course, there’s goin’ to be some canned things, and some sardines, and some everidge liquids.  You guess what besides that.”

I told him I couldn’t guess.

“Shore you couldn’t,” said Curly, dangling his bridle from the little finger of his left hand as he searched in his pocket for a match.  He had rolled a cigarette with one hand, and now he called it a cigarrillo.  These facts alone would have convicted him of coming from somewhere near the Rio Grande.