Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/600

592 in this enterprising city." Yet I am ready to believe, knowing the astonishingly rapid growth of those frontier towns, that Langtry may be, at the present time of writing, a large and flourishing place.

Our dinner we took at Maxon Springs, 350 miles from El Paso, where the usual fine station buildings and water-tank, with a telegraph office in a side-tracked baggage car, comprised the town. Beyond the curious hills which surround this place, we passed a "prairie schooner" and a Mexican ox-team, encamped to escape the oppressive heat, while their poor animals sought vainly for a dinner off the parched and scanty herbage. It was a dreary country, the only other animate objects in view being the Chinese section hands, whose tents of flimsy canvas we occasionally passed, a hawk now and then, or a coyote. A fellow-passenger aptly pictured it, in a single sentence, as a region so poor that even a crow "would have to tote his rations over it."

But the land improves as we go westward, and at Murphysville, 230 miles from El Paso, an active goat might get a good day's feed from less than an acre. Twenty-five miles back from this station is Fort Davis, an important military post, and southwest, about eighty miles distant, on the Rio Grande, is Presidio del Norte, once an important frontier town and the future initial point, perhaps, of the Mexican branch of a transcontinental railroad. The run to Valentine, 159 miles from El Paso, is over finer territory, which is eagerly sought by rancheros, who are willing to pay even four dollars an acre for it, as they are crowded out of the better lands to the north and east. At Valentine, which is a coaling station, with extensive sheds, a turn-table, and a round-house, we got an excellent supper, and then steamed on again, over a road everywhere smooth and excellent, with fat and lively deer skipping off towards the hills, coyotes loping away from the track, and prairie-dog villages appearing one after the other. Darkness settled about us, leaving the impression that we had now reached a land of plenty, and we saw no more of Texas until three o'clock next morning, when we ran into El Paso.