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Updated: May 10, 2025
Only one green spot relieved the bald red of grounds and walls; and this evidently was made by the spring which had given both value and fame to Don Carlos's range. The approach to the house was through a wide courtyard, bare, stony, hard packed, with hitching-rails and watering-troughs in front of a long porch.
The talk about Waring and Las Cruces had stirred slumbering memories; memories of night rides in New Mexico, of the cattle war, of blazing noons on the high mesas and black nights in huddled adobe towns; Las Cruces, Albuquerque, Caliente, Santa Fé and weary ponies at the hitching-rails.
Word went forth that High-Chin Bob, of the Starr, and Bud Shoop were to shoot a match for a thousand dollars a side, and some of the more enthusiastic believed it. In a few minutes the street was empty of all save the ponies at the hitching-rails. In a shallow arroyo back of town the excited throng made wagers and talked of wonderful shots made by the principals.
In spite of Blaze's plaintive tone it was patent that he was inordinately proud of Paloma and well content with his serfdom. Jonesville proved to be a typical Texas town of the modern variety, and altogether different to the pictured frontier village. There were no one-storied square fronts, no rows of saloons with well-gnawed hitching-rails, no rioting cowboys.
In front were hitching-rails. To the hitching-rails, at all times of the day, were tied ponies patiently turning their tails to the Wyoming breezes. Wyoming breezes are always going somewhere at the rate of from thirty to sixty miles an hour.
On the main street there were perhaps fifty buildings, some brick, some frame, mostly adobe, and one-third of the lot, and by far the most prosperous, were saloons. From the road Duane turned into this street. It was a wide thoroughfare lined by hitching-rails and saddled horses and vehicles of various kinds.
As he emerged from the house to the long hitching-rails under the ancient oaks, he looked eagerly for his hostess. Only Dick was there, and the stable-man, although the many saddled horses that stamped in the shade promised possibilities. But Dick and he rode away alone.
Main Street was clean again, and so were the farmers and their teams at the hitching-rails; the girls were beginning to wear white at church on Sunday, and to walk about without their hats. The great valley was as green as the hills, save where the earth had been turned, and one or two almond orchards were so pink they could be seen a mile away.
Under wide-spreading ancient oaks, where the long hitching-rails, bark-chewed, and the hoof-beaten gravel showed the stamping place of many horses, he found a pale-golden, almost tan-golden, sorrel mare. Her well-groomed spring coat was alive and flaming in the morning sun that slanted straight under the edge of the roof of trees. She was herself alive and flaming.
Rosewater owes to us, and to us alone, its beautifully paved and shaded streets we have no difficulty in remembering what a barren mud-hole it was the trees that shade the poor horses at the hitching-rails; the beautiful squares, the tropical plants and trees, the improved sewerage system, the cleanliness of the marsh border, everything in fact that has transformed Rosewater from a mere set of roofs and walls into a delightfully habitable town.
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