“Oh, dad, isn’t it beautiful!”
The sweep of her small hand took in the range rolling in long sunlit billows; but her eyes were on the hacienda—Hacienda de los Arboles, named in the sonorous Spanish after the huge cottonwoods that lent it pleasant shade.
Built in a great square, its massive walls, a yard thick and twice the height of a man, formed the back wall of the stables, adobe cottages, storehouses, and granaries on the inner side. It also lent one corner to the house which rose above it to a second story. Pierced for musketry, with a watch-tower rising above its iron-studded gates, it was, in the old days, a real fort. Besides the long row that followed the meanderings of a dry water-course across the landscape, a cluster of giant cottonwoods raised their glossy heads within the compound, shading with checkered leafage the watering wells and house. Set amidst growing fields of corn and wheat at the foot of a range that loomed in violet, crimson, or gold, according to the hour, it was as pleasant a place as ever a man looked upon and called his home.
Carleton smiled as she added, “I’d hate to have been brought up in El Paso or any other prosy American city.”
He might have replied that there were American cities she might find less prosy than El Paso. But he was well content to have her think as she did.
His own gaze, overlooking the prospect, expressed the pride of accomplishment with which men survey their completed work; nor was his satisfaction less because the buildings themselves were not of his creation. Coming here, sixteen years ago, with a nest-egg of two or three thousand dollars, he had leased and let, bought and sold with Yankee shrewdness; added acre to acre, flock to flock, until, at last, he was in position to buy Los Arboles from a “land-poor” Spanish owner.
To a man without imagination the fact that its foundations had been laid almost four centuries ago by one of Cortés’s conquistadores might have meant little. With Carleton it counted more than its broad acreage. From a trove of old papers left by the former owner he had gathered many a story of siege and battle, scandal and intrigue, consummated within its massive walls. Instead of fairy-tales, he had told these to Lee during her childhood, so that medieval atmosphere had penetrated her very being.
They seldom overlooked the hacienda, as now, without making some observations anent its past. As in some vivid pageant, they saw the old Dons, their señoras, señoritas, savage brown retainers, in the midst of their fighting, working, loving, praying. By self-adoption, as it were, Carleton, at least, had allied himself with them, had come to think of himself as belonging to the family.
“Great old fellows they were!” Though he spoke musingly, now, without connection, she instantly caught his meaning, knew he was harking back. “Great old chaps! I was looking into one of our land titles the other day, and the records read in princely fashion. ‘Between the rivers such and such, of a width that a man may ride in one day,’ that was a favorite method of establishing boundaries. No paring of land like cheese rinds; everything done by wholesale; no haggling over a few square leagues.”
“And here comes one of them.” Lee pointed her quirt at a horseman who had just topped the opposite rise. “Doesn’t he look it?”