United States or Guatemala ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


I first saw my sweetheart as we were driving the herd along the dusty road, passing a small adobe house near the city of Old Mexico. I saw a handsome young Spanish girl standing in the yard and I suppose I fell in love with her at first sight, anyway I pretended to be very thirsty and rode up and asked her for a drink.

Well beyond the last adobe house, Stratton glanced back to see old Pop Daggett still standing on the store porch and staring after him. Buck flung up one arm in a careless gesture of farewell; then a gentle downward slope in the prairie carried him out of sight of the little settlement.

Geraniums bloomed on the window-sills, and some young cottonwoods grew greenly at the door. The scarlet Navajo blanket, which had been Lola's inheritance from the prairie-schooner, was spread across a couch, and gave a final note of warmth and comfort to the low room, now plastered in adobe from ceiling to floor.

Perhaps nineteen twentieths of the houses are built of bluish-gray adobe bricks, and are only one or two stories high, forming fine cottage homes which promise simple comfort within. They are set well back from the street, leaving room for a flower garden, while almost every one has a thrifty orchard at the sides and around the back.

The big living-room of the ranch-house was warm and comfortable with its red adobe walls, its huge stone fireplace where cedar logs blazed, and its many-colored blankets. Bo Rayner sat before the fire, curled up in an armchair, absorbed in a book. On the floor lay the hound Pedro, his racy, fine head stretched toward the warmth. "Did uncle call?" asked Helen, with a start out of her reverie.

Then Solange laughed and they broke into sympathetic grins, even the solemn Sucatash showing his teeth in enjoyment as he heard her tinkling mirth with its bell-like note. Then they forgot the squatting figure by its camp fire and drove on to the ranch. This turned out to be a straggling adobe house, shaded by cottonwoods and built around three sides of a square.

An entire side of the square was occupied by a long, one-story adobe structure. This was the Governor's Palace. For three hundred years it had been the seat of turbulent and tragic history. Its solid walls had withstood many a siege and had stifled the cries of dozens of tortured prisoners.

The town had been threatened by the enemy during our absence, and General Henningsen was busy putting it into a state better suited to repel any sudden attack. Pieces of artillery looked down all the principal approaches, from behind short walls of adobe blocks, raised in the middle of the street with open passage-ways on either side.

I guess idiots acts about the same in all languages. I'll bet a dollar he understands what you're up to, anyway; so there." She drove on, in rigid perpendicularity, past the adobe ranch-house of the Gonzales family, and around the curve of the lake-shore, into the sunshine of the wild mustard that fringed the road.

We dropped into a low, broad watercourse, ascended its bed to big cottonwoods and flowing water, followed it into box canons between rim-rock carved fantastically and painted like a Moorish facade, until at last in a widening below a rounded hill, we came upon an adobe house, a fruit tree, and a round corral. This was the Double R. Charley and Windy Bill welcomed us with soda biscuits.