, too."

The tobaccoless punchers arranged themselves comfortably on the steps
of the store. Inside Sam chopped open with a hatchet the tops of the
cans of fruit.

The store, a big, white wooden building like a barn, stood fifty yards
from the ranch-house. Beyond it were the horse corrals; and still
farther the wool sheds and the brush-topped shearing pens--for the
Rancho Cibolo raised both cattle and sheep. Behind the store, at a
little distance, were the grass-thatched /jacals/ of the Mexicans who
bestowed their allegiance upon the Cibolo.

The ranch-house was composed of four large rooms, with plastered adobe
walls, and a two-room wooden ell. A twenty-feet-wide "gallery"
circumvented the structure. It was set in a grove of immense live-oaks
and water-elms near a lake--a long, not very wide, and tremendously
deep lake in which at nightfall, great gars leaped to the surface and
plunged with the noise of hippopotamuses frolicking at their bath.
From the trees hung garlands and massive pendants of the melancholy
grey moss of the South. Indeed, the Cibolo ranch-house seemed more of
the South than of the West. It looked as if old "Kiowa" Truesdell
might have brought it with him from the lowlands of Mississippi when
he came to Texas with his rifle in the hollow of his arm in '55.

But, though he did not bring the family mansion, Truesdell did bring
something in the way of a family inheritance that was more lasting
than brick or stone. He brought one end of the Truesdell-Curtis family
feud. And when a Curtis bought the Rancho de los Olmos, sixteen miles
from the Cibolo, there were lively times on the pear flats and in the
chaparral thickets off the Southwest. In those days Truesdell cleaned
the brush of many a wolf and tiger cat and Mexican lion; and one or
two Curtises fell heirs to notches on his rifle stock. Also he buried
a brother with a Curtis bullet in him on the bank of the lake at
Cibolo. And then the Kiowa Indians made their last raid upon the
ranches between the Frio and the Rio Grande, and Truesdell at the head
of his rangers rid the earth of them to the last brave, earning his
sobriquet. Then came prosperity in the form of waxing herds and
broadening lands. And then old age and bitterness, when he sat, with
his great mane of hair as white as the Spanish-dagger blossoms and his
fierce, pale-blue eyes, on the shaded gallery at Cibolo, growling like
the pumas that he had slain. He snapped his fingers at old age