Senor Johnson lived at the home ranch with a Chinese cook, and
Parker, his foreman. The home ranch was of adobe, built with
loopholes like a fort. In the obsolescence of this necessity,
other buildings had sprung up unfortified. An adobe bunkhouse
for the cow-punchers, an adobe blacksmith shop, a long, low
stable, a shed, a windmill and pond-like reservoir, a whole
system of corrals of different sizes, a walled-in vegetable
garden--these gathered to themselves cottonwoods from the
moisture of their being, and so added each a little to the green
spot in the desert. In the smallest corral, between the stable
and the shed, stood a buckboard and a heavy wagon, the only
wheeled vehicles about the place. Under the shed were rows of
saddles, riatas, spurs mounted with silver, bits ornamented with
the same metal, curved short irons for the range branding, long,
heavy "stamps" for the corral branding. Behind the stable lay
the "pasture," a thousand acres of desert fenced in with wire.
There the hardy cow-ponies sought out the sparse, but nutritious,
bunch grass, sixty of them, beautiful as antelope, for they were
the pick of Senor Johnson's herds.
And all about lay the desert, shimmering, changing, many-tinted,
wonderful, hemmed in by the mountains that seemed tenuous and
thin, like beautiful mists, and by the sky that seemed hard and
polished like a turquoise.
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