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Alamo Ranch: A Story of New Mexico

Alamo Ranch: A Story of New Mexico

TO LEON

Across the silence that between us stays,
Speak! I should hear it from God's outmost sun,
Above Earth's noise of idle blame and praise, —
The longed-for whisper of thy dear "Well done!"

CHAPTER I

It is autumn; and the last week in November. In New Mexico, this land of sunshine, the season is now as kindly as in the early weeks of our Northern September.

To-day the sky is one cloudless arch of sapphire! The light breeze scarce ruffles a leaf of the tall alamo, the name tree of this ranch. Here any holding bigger than a kitchen garden is known as a ranch. The alamo, Spanish for poplar, lends here and there its scant, stiff shade to this roomy adobe dwelling, with its warm southern frontage and half-detached wings. Behind the house irregular out-buildings are scattered about.

A commodious corral, now the distinguished residence of six fine Jersey cows, lies between the house and the orchard, – a not over-flourishing collection of peach, apricot, and plum trees.

Here and there may be seen wide patches of kitchen garden, carefully intersected by irrigating ditches.

Near and afar, wide alfalfa fields with their stiff aftermath stretch away to the very rim of the mesa, where the cotton-tail makes his home, and sage-brush and mesquite strike root in the meagre soil. Cones of alfalfa hay stacked here and there outline themselves like giant beehives against the soft blue sky; and over all lies the sunny silence of a cloudless afternoon with its smiling westering sun.

Basking in this grateful warmth, their splint arm-chairs idly tilted against the house-front, the boarders look with sated invalid eyes upon this gracious landscape.

Alamo Ranch is a health resort. In this thin, dry air of Mesilla Valley, high above the sea level, the consumptive finds his Eldorado. Hither, year by year, come these foredoomed children of men to fight for breath, putting into this struggle more noble heroism and praiseworthy courage than sometimes goes to victory in battle-fields.

Of these combatants some are still buoyed by the hope of recovery; others are but hopeless mortals, with the single sad choice of eking out existence far from friends and home, or returning to native skies, there to throw up hands in despair and succumb to the foe.

Sixteen miles away the Organ Mountains – seeming, in this wonderfully clear atmosphere, within but a stone's throw – loom superbly against the cloudless sky; great hills of sand are these, surmounted by tall, serrated peaks of bare rock, and now taking on their afternoon array in the ever-changing light, rare marvels of shifting color, – amethyst and violet, rosy pink, creamy gold, and dusky purple.

The El Paso range rises sombrely on the gray distance, and on every hand detached sugar-loaf peaks lend their magnificence to the grand mesa-range that cordons the Mesilla Valley.