Page:The Road to Monterey (1925).pdf/281

 records of them in Mexico that had lived ninety years. Pablo refused to discuss its age. A woman's age should be inquired into only when she goes to be married; a burro's when it is to be sold. There was no money that could buy Pablo's friend and companion out of his kindly hands.

Pablo was still several miles from home; he could not reach it now until well after dark. It was well enough, he said, speaking to Benito, the ass, for there was a pleasure in seeing the hills at that distance as a man rode on his way. It seemed to him that he never had seen so much beauty in the hills before, the sun just looking back on the world over its shoulder, as a man might say, lighting the tops of them, ridge after ridge, peak after peak seeming to stand like islands out of the blue mysterious something that filled the canyons like the smoke of a million fires. And it was nothing when a man went down the mountains into it; nothing but shadows and gray rocks, and sage and laurel and chaparral, with little blue and red flowers between. That was the mystery of the blue filling that floated into the canyons at this hour of the day. A man might walk on the solidness of that blue, it seemed from here, or from the mountain tops, as he knew very well. But let the sun go down and it would vanish, cheating the eyes like a rainbow that seems to rest its column in a man's field.

No, truly, the hills never had appeared so beautiful in his eyes before. It troubled him to find the