LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OCTOBER, 1885

ON A TEXAS SHEEP-RANCH

I

There are words which have careers as well as men, or, perhaps it may be more happily said, as well as women. Mere words breathed on by Fancy, and sent forth not so much to serve man's ordinary colloquial uses, apparently, as to fascinate his mind, have their débuts. their season, their vogue, and finally a period in which it is really too bad if they have not the consolation of reflecting upon their conquests; for conquests they certainly have. The great captivators—the Cleopatras of the vocabulary—one easily recognizes; but besides these there is a host of small flirts and every-day coquettes, whom one hardly suspects till they have a little carried him away. Almost every one remembers how in this light company he first came across the little word ranch. It had in its youth distinctly the cachet of the verbal flying squadron, the "nameless something," the oenanthic whiff which flies to the head. There are signs that its best days as a word are now over, and in contemplating it at present one has a vision of a passée brunette, in the costume of Fifine at the Fair, solacing herself with thoughts of early triumphs. "Would a farm have served?" she murmurs. "Would a plantation, an orange-grove, have satisfied the desperate young man? No, no; he must have his ranch! There was no charm could soothe his melancholy, and wring for him the public bosom, save mine."

I made this reflection during a period of incarceration in a sleeping-car,—a form of confinement which, like any other, throws the prisoner considerably on his fancy; and a vision somewhat like the above smoothed for a moment the pillow of an "upper berth," and pleased better than the negro porter. Half a dozen of those days of too many paper novels, of too much tobacco, of too little else, followed each other with the sameness of so many raw oysters. Then there came a chill night of wide moonlit vacuity passed on the prairie by the side of the driver of a "jumper,"—a driver who slumbered, happy man!—and at peep of dawn I found myself standing, stiff and shivering, in a certain little Texas town. A much-soiled, white little street, a bit of greenish-yellow, treeless plain soft in the morning mist, a rosy fringe at the edge of the sky,—it was of these things, together with a disagreeable sense of imponderability of body from the cold and sleepless ride, that I was vaguely aware as the jumper—rigorous vehicle!—disappeared round a corner. Frontier towns are not lovely, and the death-like peace which seemed properly to accompany the chalky pallor of the buildings was somewhat uncanny; but it proved to be only what sleep can do for a village with railroad influences one hundred miles away. We entered boldly the adobe before which we had been dropped, and found a genial landlord in an impromptu costume justified by the hour, an inn-album of quite cosmopolitan range of inscriptions, and a breakfast for which a week of traveller's fare had amply fortified the spirit.

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. There were great sweeps of ochre, of gray, of fresh, light green, pointed with black dots of live-oak, and traversed by tortuous lines of indigo where the pecan treed creeks pursued their foiled courses, and troops of little hills grouped themselves about,—pink, pinkish, purple, purpling blue, white, as they faded from view like the evanescent cherubs in the corner of an old master. The hills, however, were little only because the stretch was so vast; it was really a broad plafond upon which they had solemnly entered to dance a minuet with the playful shadows of the clouds. The sky possessed everything. There was so much of it that existence seemed to have become in a sense a celestial—or at least an aerial—affair: the world was your balloon.

After the third creek-crossing the road ran straight as an avenue through a broad, level reach, and we flew along gayly. The little mesquite-trees, prim, dainty, and delicate, stood about in seeming order, civilizing the landscape and giving it the air of an orchard; the prairie-dog villages were thrown into a tumult of excitement by our passage; a chaparral-cock slipped out of a bush, stared an instant, pulled the string that lifts his tail and top-knot, and settled down for a race directly under the horses' feet. We passed the point of a hill, gained a slight rise, and the ranch was in sight. It must be confessed that it was not in appearance all that the name might imply,—not the sort of place for which one starts after having provided one's self with a navy revolver and a low estimate of the value of human life. It was, in fact, a very pretty and domestic scene, a little village of half a dozen buildings and a net-work of white limestone and brush corrals. Shortly I was supping in a neat little cottage, and endeavoring in the usual way to be agreeable to some one in muslin. In this modern world we change our skies, truly, but not—not our bric-à-brac. On the walls of the pretty dining-room one beheld with rising feeling one's old friends the Japanese fan and the discarded plate still clinging with the touching persistence of the ivy to the oak. To be sure, there was a tall half-breed Indian moving about with the silent agility of the warpath, but he wore a white apron, and his hideous intention was to fill one's wineglass. If the longitude had led me to meditate right buffalo's hump, "washed down" with something coarse and potent enough to justify the phrase, it was clear that I was painfully behind the stroke of the clock. Life, good lady, takes an undignified pleasure in arranging these petty shocks to the expectations, which we soon learn to dismiss with a smile. The cold mutton and ordinaire were excellent, and we had some coffee and a cigarette on the piazza. The sun was setting far away behind a hill on the other side of the creek. A soft sound came down the valley from a remote flock of sheep. A little breeze sprang up and ran tremulously about, shaking the tufted grass and the slim boughs of the mesquites, and putting some question with a wistfully hopeful swish. Plainly, one could be very much at home here. The visionary brunette had evidently ranged herself, was living down the reputation of early vivid experiences and successfully cultivating the domestic virtues.

II

Six or eight years earlier, four young men had left New York on a Galveston steamer, their departure being attended by such an assemblage of young women that on the second day out their companions of the voyage confided the supposition that it had been a "bridal party." That little Spanish-American word ravaging our coasts and carrying off the pride of the youth has to answer for many such bridal parties, whose tours have been followed with pins and colored pencils and eyes more eager than those of mothers-in-law. In a month or so the young men had pitched a wall-tent within a day's ride of the Rio Grande, and were seriously occupied in sacrificing each other's feelings on the altar of experimental cookery, in herding sheep with the assistance of paper novels, and in writing exceedingly long letters to the North. This wall-tent was the larva of the ranch. But the arid southern country proved inconvenient, and collecting their effects in a prairie-schooner and driving their flocks before them, they effected a masterly change of base, which brought them two hundred miles to the northward and set them down in a delightful pasture-land, watered by three pretty creeks, near one of which they erected an adobe hut. This solitary house on a broad flat, an object of amazement to wandering hordes of cattle, was the ranch during a most interesting period, and its thatched roof and somewhat fetid walls became for the occupants overgrown with fine clusters of association. Within a few miles of its site the present village took shape.

The country was a frankly monotonous conformation of alternating hills and valleys,—"divides" and "draws,"—with wide flats near the creeks. Gulches, more or less deep, down the valley-lines of the draws, and traversing the flats to the creeks,—the so-called arroyos,—were a common physical feature. In the wet season they were running streams, but for most of the year they were dry, with here and there a waterhole, flowers and chaparral growing in them, and, at intervals, pecans. The pecan-trees grew thickly along the borders of the creeks, while the mesquites cloaked with gossamer wide portions of the flats; and here and there in the valleys and on the sides of the hills the sombre, self-enwrapped live-oaks stood about, like philosophers musing amid the general lightness. Spanish-dagger, bear-grass, and persimmon-bushes freckled the sides of the rocky divides with dark spots, and mistletoe hung its fine green globes like unillumined lanterns in the branches of the mesquites. Over the plains and slopes a sparse turf of various grasses, differing in color and changing with the season, gave the airy landscape its brilliant and versatile complexion. A dozen varieties of cactus, portulaccas, geraniums, petunias, verbenas, scattered over the prairie, morning-glories and sunflowers in the arroyos and along the creeks, and many a flower nameless to the general, abounded. So, it should be added, did in their season plover, snipe, ducks, and geese.

The business of the ranch was the antediluvian occupation of rearing and shearing sheep, and to that end the village included a shearing-shed and a large wool-house. Besides these there were three cottages and several other buildings, among which one called the "ranch-house" was the focus of the activity of the place, and, being also a survival from a comparatively early day, was a somewhat characteristic affair. It was a box-house, painted red, with a broad porch thatched with bear-grass, and a saddle-shed butting up against it. The interior, barring a little store at one end, was a single large room, bedroom, sitting-room, office, furnished with home-made tables with blankets for cloths, knocked-up chairs with cowhide seats and coyote-skin backs, deers' antlers draped with "slickers" (Texan for the 'longshoreman's yellow water-proof) and wide-brimmed "ten-dollar" hats, and at one end two tiers of bunks, with leather cases for six-shooters nailed to their sides. This room served for the abode of the storekeeper, for the transaction of business, and for the accommodation of the perennial casual guest. It was rude, but, especially of evenings about the lamp, it had a marked air of pipe-and-tobacco comfort.

The little store was patronized by the cow-boy, so much abused with sensational or picturesque intentions, and by the small farmers with irrigation patches in the vicinity. It was likewise the resort of Encarnacion and Tomas, and others their brethren, from the Mexican village a few miles up the creek, or from isolated abiding-places round about. Here they would come, and, rolling cigarettes of the brown paper they affect and the eleemosynary tobacco open on the counter, to which all were welcome (such were the amenities of shopping on the ranch), they would lounge about, ever smiling and chattering in soft voices, finally to say 'uenos dias with two bits' worth of bacon, or corn-meal, or pink candy for the chiquitas. Here, too, would come Tomasa, and, with even more than usual feminine zeal in matters of dress, at once try on the ready-made calico gown she purchased, while the store-keeper smoked his pipe and stroked his beard.

Excepting the cow-boys, the people composing the clientage of the store were for the most part resident in one of two farm-settlements located on the creek, about ten miles apart, one exclusively Mexican, the other almost entirely "white." Besides these, the families of many of the Mexican hands lived close by. These last were constantly assisting conversation at the cottages with such incidents as the following:

The cook—a tall, gaunt negro of a mediaevally "intense" nature—came in with an excited manner, followed by Madame Alguin, very much troubled, wringing her hands, and dissolved in tears.

"Panchot's little boy," said the cook, "is killed."

We were naturally aghast. Little Panchot had been colero at the recent shearing.

"Is he dead?" we queried hoarsely.

"He was dead," replied the cook, with seriousness: "he is not dead now."

With this light and delicate touch the cook swept the gamut of our emotions from awe at little Panchot's sudden taking off to pleasure at his speedy resurrection. We repaired at once to Madame Alguin's residence to view the subject of this miracle: lest the miracle should not be so complete as one might wish, we carried with us a little hartshorn and Pond's extract. Madame Alguin's villa was a fine wide-spreading live-oak, with a tent as a sort of annex, about two minutes from the ranch. On our arrival we found four Mexican women, seven children, one man, three dogs, four goats, and several roosters, gathered round the form of little Panchot stretched beneath the live-oak. A fire smouldered a little way off, and a cradle hung from the branch of the fatherly tree. Little Panchot had a nasty cut about an inch long through his cheek. He had been herding his goats on the bank of the creek when he was knocked over by a stone from the other side. He swooned,—then he was dead; he came to,—and, presto, he was alive again. He was soon running about with his wonted friskiness, and making himself useful in chasing wild tennis-balls. This little boy's mother was, poor woman, very much of a sloven, but he had a string of little sisters who were as nice as could be. They went about in white cotton gowns—amazingly clean, considering that they lived under a tree—tied at the waist with red scarfs; their black hair was smoothly gathered at the backs of their pretty heads, and they had a demure and quaintly maternal air; they looked at you with a tranquil, moon-like gaze, which seemed to say that their ideas, which were on the way, had tarried for the moment in some boon southern country.