Leon Starr, by common consent the "star boarder" of Alamo Ranch, has already been presented to the reader. He has taken the large two-windowed room on the ground-floor commanding a glorious view of the distant Organ Mountains. After getting his breath in this unaccustomed altitude, Leon's next care has been for the depressed lungers who daily gather on the boarding-house piazza and wonder if life is still worth living. To get them outside themselves by cheery good-fellowship, to perform for them little homely services, not much in the telling, but making their lives a world easier, has been a part of his method for uplifting their general tone.
Of an inventive turn of mind, and an amateur mechanic, he has brought with him a tiny tool chest; and it soon becomes the family habit to look to Leon Starr for general miscellaneous tinkering, as the mending of door and trunk locks, the regulating watches and clocks, the adjustment of the bedevilled sewing-machine of their good landlady, and the restoration of harmonious working to all disgruntled mechanical gear, from garret to cellar. He it is who, on rainy days, manufactures denim clothes-bags for clumsy-fingered fellows; who fashions from common canes gathered on banks of irrigating ditches, photo-frames for everybody, and shows them how to arrange the long cane tassels with decorative effect above door and window, and how to soften the glare of kerosene lamps by making for them relieving shades of rose-colored paper.
Pessimistic indeed is that lunger who, succumbing to the charm of this gracious nature, does not feel the cheery lift in his heavy atmosphere.
From the landlord and his wife, both worn by the strain of doing their best for chronically discontented people, down to Fang Lee, the Chinese chef, Dennis Kearney, the table-waiter, the over-worked Mexican house-maids, and the two native chore-boys—one and all rise up to call the star boarder blessed.
Out on the mesa the air is finer and brighter than on the lower plane of the ranch, and full of the life and stir of moving things,—quail, rabbits, and doves.
Leon had at first found the thin air of this altitude somewhat difficult; but since time and use have accustomed his lungs to these novel atmospheric conditions, shooting on the mesa has become a part of his daily programme, and his quail, rabbits, and pigeons prove a toothsome contribution to the already excellent ranch table.
A small, shy Mexican herd-boy, pasturing his lean goats on the mesa, gradually makes friends with the tall, kindly sportsman. As they have between them but these two mutually intelligible words, bueno (good) and mucho calor (very warm), their conversation is circumscribed. Kind deeds are, however, more to the point than words, and go without the saying; and when Leon instructed the ragged herd-boy in the use of his bow, and made and weighted his arrows for him, he understood, and became his devoted henchman, following in his path all through the week-day tramps, and on Sundays coming to the ranch with clean face and hands to adore his fetich, and watch, with admiring eyes, his novel works and ways.
CHAPTER III
After a protracted interval of tranquil sunshine, a stormy wind came blustering from the west, bringing to Mesilla Valley, in its wintry train, sunless days, light flurries of snow, and general dreariness.