Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/599

Rh they couldn't understand his Spanish. He had given his orders to them in a tone loud enough to be heard over the entire valley of the Sabinas, but they persisted in not understanding him. "And so," he continued, "I pulled out a six-shooter and said, 'You miserable, God-forsaken yeller-bellies, and scum of soap-grease, do you understand that?'"

"And did they?"

"Well, I should smile. D' you s'pose I'd leave a good position of a hundred and fifty a month, and found, if I didn't have to? "

I left Eagle Pass with the silvery moonlight flooding its sandy streets; another midnight connection placed me aboard the California Express, and I awoke next morning at the Pecos River. The scenery here is grand enough to warrant a visit for no other purpose than to view it, for the track runs along the Rio Grande, beneath stupendous cliffs hollowed into natural caves. We crossed the Rio Pecos at Painted Cave, 224 miles from San Antonio, over an iron bridge that seemed hundreds of feet above the foaming river, while the mighty walls of rock towered high over the solitary station and the slender structure that spanned the chasm. Above the Pecos, the water of the Rio Grande seems clear and blue; below it, yellow and turbid. Both rivers flow rapidly along between gaunt and gray rock-ribbed banks, where the vegetation is solely bear-grass, and yucca, and bright flowers, with no succulent grass, and no living thing in sight.

Twenty miles farther on is Langtry, where, in a construction car switched off on a siding, we found an excellent breakfast awaiting us. There were no buildings here but the station, yet I read in an El Paso paper of that week, "A big boom seems to have struck Langtry on the 'Sunset'; the deputy surveyor of Pecos County is consulting with Mr. Roy Bean about laying off lots for a hotel and a stockyard in this enterprising town." I said to myself, as I read this item, that "big boom" must have knocked all the buildings clean out of the place; but the real significance of the paragraph is shown in an additional morsel of news: "Mr. Roy Bean is now ready to sell a few choice lots