landscapes generally, but when he awoke on the
last morning of his journey and found himself once more in the wide and
desolate country of his birth, he was so deeply stirred and interested
that he forgot all about the girl. Devotion to one particular bit of soil
is a Mexican characteristic, and in Ramon it was highly developed because
he had spent so much of his life close to the earth. Every summer of his
boyhood he had been sent to one of the sheep ranches which belonged to the
various branches of his numerous family. Each of these ranches was merely
a headquarters where the sheep were annually dipped and sheared and from
which the herds set out on their long wanderings across the open range.
Often Ramon had followed them--across the deserts where the heat shimmered
and the yellow dust hung like a great pale plume over the rippling backs
of the herd, and up to the summer range in the mountains where they fed
above the clouds in lush green pastures crowned with spires of rock and
snow. He had shared the beans and mutton and black coffee of the herders
and had gone to sleep on a pile of peltries to the evensong of the coyotes
that hung on the flanks of the herd. Hunting, fishing, wandering, he had
lived like a savage and found the life good.

It was this life of primitive freedom that he had longed for in his exile.
He had thought little of his family and less of his native town, but a
nostalgia for open spaces and free wanderings had been always with him. He
had come to hate the city with its hard walled-in ways and its dirty air,
and also the eastern country-side with its little green prettiness
surrounded by fences. He longed for a land where one can see for fifty
miles, and not a man or a house. He thought that alkaline dust on his lips
would taste sweet.

Now he saw again the scorched tawny levels, the red hills dotted with
little gnarled _pinon_ trees, the purple mystery of distant mountains. A
great friendly warmth filled his body, and his breath came a little
quickly with eagerness. When he saw a group of Mexicans jogging along the
road on their scrawny mounts he wanted to call out to them: "_Como lo va,
amigos?_" He would have liked to salute this whole country, which was his
country, and to tell it how glad he was to see it again. It was the one
thing in the world that he loved, and the only thing that had ever given
him pleasure without tincture of bitterness.

He heard two men in the seat behind him talkin