Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/487

 Though serving in a menial capacity—while his father, who claimed to have good and sufficient reason for having kept quiet till now, was taking the necessary steps to secure the long-lost title and fortune—"Charley" was deaf to all banter on the subject. He was supercilious and from in the faith that he too was a Tichborne.

"And don't you forget it," he threw out to us by way of a parting injunction.

Out of the cañon, at the van of the construction work, we were on the Temecula Plains, a part of the Upper Santa Ana Valley. The course of the road was marked henceforth only by an occasional surveyor's stake. We rode over fifty miles of absolutely treeless, verdureless desert. It was desert, however, with a certain fascination in its sterility. It had a distinct beauty of coloring. The brown, drab, and blackish waste, catching sparkles of light on its flinty surface, shimmered in the sunshine. The heat was tempered by a gentle breeze. Crags of black, water-worn rock, which had once been reefs in an inland sea, rose in bold, fantastic shapes, and noble mountain ranges stood up along the distant horizons, their rugged harshness softened into blues and purples by a delicious veiling atmosphere. Half-way across we fell in with a single sign of human life, in the shape of an abandoned pine shanty. On going around to the rear the boards were found to have been knocked off, probably to be used for fuel. Some former travellers, halting here like ourselves, had occupied a part of their leisure with writing inscriptions in lead-pencil. One had written a direction about drinkable water in the neighborhood. Another, apparently finding this erroneous, had inscribed below it, with much more vigor than regard for adopted usages in spelling, "Lyor!!"