On hearing him declare his name—by presumption already known to her—she but more tenderly cherished the bit of cardboard, chafing against her snow-white bosom; at the same time muttering in soft pensive soliloquy, heard only by herself:—
“Maurice the mustanger! despite your sooty covering—despite your modest pretence—you have touched the heart of a Creole maiden. Mon Dieu—mon Dieu! He is too like Lucifer for me to despise him!”
Chapter Five.
The Home of the Horse-Hunter.
Where the Rio de Nueces (River of Nuts) collects its waters from a hundred tributary streams—lining the map like the limbs of a grand genealogical tree—you may look upon a land of surpassing fairness. Its surface is “rolling prairie,” interspersed with clumps of post-oak and pecân, here and there along the banks of the watercourses uniting into continuous groves.
In some places these timbered tracts assume the aspect of the true chapparal—a thicket, rather than a forest—its principal growth being various kinds of acacia, associated with copaiva and creosote trees, with wild aloes, with eccentric shapes of cereus, cactus, and arborescent yucca.
These spinous forms of vegetation, though repulsive to the eye of the agriculturist—as proving the utter sterility of the soil—present an attractive aspect to the botanist, or the lover of Nature; especially when the cereus unfolds its huge wax-like blossoms, or the Fouquiera splendens overtops the surrounding shrubbery with its spike of resplendent flowers, like a red flag hanging unfolded along its staff.
The whole region, however, is not of this character. There are stretches of greater fertility; where a black calcareous earth gives nourishment to trees of taller growth, and more luxuriant foliage. The “wild China”—a true sapindal—the pecân, the elm, the hackberry, and the oak of several species—with here and there a cypress or Cottonwood—form the components of many a sylvan scene, which, from the blending of their leaves of various shades of green, and the ever changing contour of their clumps, deserves to be denominated fair.