Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/380

 368 they not weigh you in their balance for so much gold? You are pistolless, and they know it. Perhaps they know too that you are a Methodist parson, and therefore their legitimate, nay, commanded, prey. "When you say peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh." Well, it may be so, and so may it be on shipboard; but it may not also. They have treated me splendidly so far. I will believe and hope unto the end.

The scarlet is becoming crimson, and its darker edges purple, the sure sign of approaching dissolution.

The hundred horses that have just been up here drinking, and then out in die chaparral for a nip at the new grass, are wandering back to their corral, an inclosure of upstanding logs. We shall have to leave our log and outlook, the big willow standing in water just at my feet, the green landscape fast turning gray, and the solemn, affectionate, parental hills, not so solemn as that they are not happy-looking also, as all properly solemn persons are, and hie us to the inside of our rancho.

You have heard much about ranchos. Let me describe this one. It is a very small pueblo, or a tiny corner town, like the larger towns, except there is in it no Casa Grande, no brick or mortar dwellings, only adobe. But our rancho, like a new Western town, aspires to a future, and is laid out with more care than most of such villages. It has a square, or plaza, on this small prairie, three sides already surrounded with the huts that may give way sometime to houses of grander make and material. But here the law of the larger houses prevails. As a log-cabin is a Fifth Avenue house in its germ, so a true rancho is a Spanish castle or Mexican casa grande in its beginning. First logs, then wood, then marble; first mud, then mortar, then marble. This rancho is exactly after the type of Barron's and Escandron's great houses in Mexico; a common gate-way for horses, carriages, men, and dogs; in this case, pigs are added, a luxury not allowed in the city. A door opens to rooms on either side of the gate-way, porter's there, owner's here; then comes a large square court, with rooms opening into it. The rear side of this court is a stable, and another court behind the