"Why not?"
"For a reason you will appreciate as well as I do; it is much too far off."
"Do you think so?" Don Miguel asked.
Valentine could not repress a smile at this question.
"My friend," he said quietly to him, "since you have been in the desert, circumstances have forced you to take so many turns and twists, that you have completely lost all idea of distances, and do not suspect, I feel assured, how many miles we are from the Paso."
"I confess I do not," Don Miguel said in surprise. "Still, I fancy we cannot be very far."
"Make a guess."
"Well, one hundred and fifty miles, at the most."
"My poor friend," Valentine remarked, with a shrug of his shoulders, "you are out of your reckoning; we are more than seven hundred miles from the Paso del Norte, which is the extreme limit of the civilised settlements."
"The deuce!" the hacendero exclaimed, "I did not fancy we had gone so far."