When E. M. told him that he had come from Boston, as he was still a student at Harvard, the Westerner could neither understand how it was that E. M. did not know his brother, nor that a man of such an age and size could still be getting an education.
“Book learning” was a good thing, he thought, but twenty years of age was too late in his opinion to be still acquiring it. He himself had run away from home at the age of eleven. Not because of ill-treatment, but merely that it seemed the manly thing to do. In his opinion a boy was a no-account specimen who would stay past his twelfth year “hangin’ round his womenfolks.”
To run away and never send a word home seems to be the commonplace behavior of Western boys. “I don’t know how your mothers stand the anxiety,” I said aloud, “not to know whether their sons are even alive.”
“I reckon that’s so. I never showed up nor wrote for six years. One evening I walks in on the old folks, and they didn’t recognize me; the old woman went plum’ over backwards when she saveys it was me. That was some years ago and I haven’t been back since.”
Having finished luncheon E. M. cranked the car, and our guest gathered up the trailing reins of his patiently standing horse. Once his rider was in the saddle, however, the broncho, as though to show what he could do, gave quite a gallery display of bucking, while his rider gave no less an exhibition of Western horsemanship, rolling a cigarette in tranquil disregard of his pony’s hump-backed leaps, which, however, soon settled down into a steady gallop that carried our friend across the plains. On the top of a nubble he waved to us and we waved back as we continued, on our side regretfully, our separate ways.
We have passed any number of little Mexican, or Indian, adobe villages. One house was surrounded by a picket fence painted bright laundry blue. Several had blue door and window frames. The houses were all one-storied and the people looked more Mexican than Indian.
When we finally arrived, without further difficulty, at Las Vegas, it seemed rather questionable whether we would be able to go on next day or not. The barometer was down, several other motorists doleful and the outlook very glum.
“What did you start so early in the season for?” we heard one driver ask another.
“Well,” said the second, “I don’t mind a little speculation as to what you’re going to run into. If you know the road ahead of you is all fine and dandy, what’s to keep your interest up?”
Leaving Las Vegas early the next morning, we encountered the same erratic weather that we ran through the day before. When we happened to be under an unclouded area, we could see that all about us were separate storm clouds, black smudges against an otherwise clear sky. As we drove beneath one of the black areas, we were deluged with rain, or hail, or snow, and through it came into sunny weather again. It was the most curious sensation to run into a blinding storm, and being able to gauge beforehand how long it would take us to pass through it.