Throughout the whole of the habitable globe there nowhere is to be found
more delightful or more invigorating air than that which every traveller
through New Mexico, from Albuquerque, past Las Vegas, to the Raton
Mountains, is free to breathe.
Miss Grace Winthrop, of Boston, and also Miss Winthrop, her paternal
aunt, and also Mr. Hutchinson Port, of Philadelphia, her maternal
uncle--all of whom were but forty hours removed from the Alkali Desert
west of the Continental Divide--felt in the very depths of their several
beings how entirely good this air was; and, as their several natures
moved them, they betrayed their lively appreciation of its excellence.
Miss Grace Winthrop, having contrived for herself, with the intelligent
assistance of the porter, a most comfortable nest of pillows, suffered
her novel to remain forgotten upon her knees; and, as she leaned her
pretty blond head against the wood-work separating her section from that
adjoining it, looked out upon the brown mountains, and accorded to those
largely-grand objects of nature the rare privilege of being reflected
upon the retina of her very blue eyes. Yet the mountains could not
flatter themselves with the conviction that contemplation of them wholly
filled her mind, for occasionally she smiled a most delightful smile.
Miss Winthrop, retired from the gaze of the world in the cell that the
Pullman-car people euphemistically style a state-room, ignored all such
casual excrescences upon the face of nature as mountains, and seriously
read her morning chapter of Emerson.
Mr. Hutchinson Port, lulled by the easy, jog-trot motion of the car,
and soothed by the air from Paradise that, for his virtues, he was being
permitted to breathe, lapsed into calm and grateful slumber: and dreamed
(nor could a worthy Philadelphian desire a better dream) of a certain
meeting of the Saturday Night Club, in December, 1875, whereat the
terrapin was remarkable, even for Philadelphia.
Miss Winthrop, absorbed in her Emersonian devotions, and Mr. Hutchinson
Port, absorbed in slumber, did not perceive that the slow motion of the
train gradually became slower, and finally entirely ceased; and even
Grace, lost in her pleasant daydream, scarcely observed that the
unsightly buildings of a little way-station had thrust themselves
into the foreground of her landscape--for this foreground she ignored,
keeping her blue eyes serenely fixed upon the great brown mountains
beyond. Nor was she more than dimly conscious of the appearance upon the
station platform of a tall, broad-shouldered young man clad in corduroy,
wearing a wide-brimmed felt-hat, and girded about with a belt, stuck
full of cartridges, from which depended a very big revolver. In a vague
way she was conscious of this young man's existence, and of an undefined
feeling that, as the type of a dangerous and interesting class, his
appearance was opportune in a part of the country which she had been led
to believe was inhabited almost exclusively by cut-throats and outlaws.
In a minute or two the train went on again, and as it started Grace was
aroused and shocked by the appearance at the forward end of the car of
the ruffianly character whom she had but half seen from the car window.
For a moment she believed that the train-robbery, that she had been
confidently expecting over since her departure from San Francisco, was
about to take place. Her heart beat hard, and her breath came quickly.
But before these symptoms had time to become alarming the desperado had
passed harmlessly to the rear end of the car, and after him had come the
porter carrying his valise and a Winchester rifle.
"Goin' to Otero? Yes, sah! All right, sah! Put yo' heah; nice seat on
shady side, sah! Thank yo', sah! Have a pillow, sah?" And, hearing this
address on the part of the porter, Grace knew that the desperado,
for the moment at least, was posing in the character of a law-abiding
citizen, and was availing himself of his rights as such to ride in
a Pullman-car. Being thus relieved of cause for immediate alarm, her
breast presently began to swell with a fine indignation at the impudence
of this abandoned person in thus thrusting himself into a place
reserved, if not absolutely for aristocratic, certainly, at least, for
respectable society.