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Music and brightest eyes mark the closing of this day. In late watches the sentinels remember the feast as they pace their rounds, for none are forgotten in largesse. Fair Juanita learns to love the dainty title of Senora. Light is her heart as she leaves for the Hills. Don Miguel's barges already are on the San Joaquin. The cattle have reached their potreros on the Mariposa.
The mounted figures of vaqueros galloped in the distance, and the great herds fed with all their horned heads one way, in one single wavering line as far as eye could reach across the broad potreros.
Some travelling officials may reach the San Joaquin. The one bright possibility of her life is a future visit to the seashore. Spring casts its mantle of wild flowers again over the hillocks. The rich grass waves high in the potreros; the linnets sing blithely in the rose-bushes. Loyal Don Miguel, who always keeps his word, girds himself for a journey to the distant Presidio.
"It circled and seemed to come down somewhere on this side the Potreros and it has not been seen since. Ask the kids if they saw something that looked like a big bird flying." This from the unseen one, who had raised his voice as impatience seized him. These Mexicans were so slow-witted! Johnny heard Mateo's voice, speaking at length.
The country, with its rolling savannahs, covered with grass, is admirably suited for cattle-raising, and great numbers are exported to the neighbouring country of Costa Rica. Scarcely any attention is, however, paid to the improvement of the breeds. Few stations have reserve potreros of grass.
Johnny spied a Mexican who was leaning against the wall of a smaller building, smoking and staring pensively across the moonlighted plain toward that portion of the United States where the Potreros hunched themselves up against the stars. "Bring me some gas, you!" he called peremptorily.
For a number of hours we have to follow the base of the huge potreros, crossing narrow ravines, ascending steep but not long slopes, until at about noon we stand on the brink of a gorge so deep that it may be termed a chasm. We look down to a narrow bottom and groves of cottonwood trees.
Indeed, we had started early that morning in order to have time enough to look at the bulls in the potreros the great grass-meadows that lie for miles outside the city, and which are made immensely fertile by flooding from time to time. Wherever we saw a bull in the distance, Don Juan and his grand little horse Pancho plunged over a bank and through a gap, and we after him.
But we are not going to follow this trail. We turn to the left, and with the dizzy chasm of Cañon del Alamo to our right, proceed westward on one of the narrow tongues which, as the reader may remember, descend toward the Rio Grande from the high western mountains, and which are called in New Mexico potreros.
Evidences of the war increased as the journey lengthened. The potreros were lush with grass, but no herds grazed upon them; villages were deserted and guano huts were falling into decay, charred fields growing up to weeds and the ruins of vast centrales showing where the Insurrectos had been at work.
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