husband by the
feminine artifice of weeping. In days of her youth and beauty this had
been very effective, but now that these had passed, it was productive
only of good-humored raillery from him, and mirth from the bystanders.

"No wonder Jim has the finest ranch in Arizony," the cowboys were wont
to say, "with Josephine a irrigatin' it all the time."

Allen Hacienda was certainly a garden spot in that desert country. The
building was of the old Mexican style, an architecture found, by
centuries of experience, to be suited best to the climate and the
materials of the land. The house was only one story in height. The
rooms and outbuildings sprawled over a wide expanse of ground. The
walls were of native stone and adobe clay; over them clambered
grape-vines. In front of the home Mrs. Allen had planted a garden. A
'dobe wall cut off the house from the corral and the bunk-house. A
heavy girder spanned the distance from the low roof to the top of the
barrier. Latticework, supporting a grape-vine, formed, with a girder, a
gateway through which one could catch from the piazza a view of a
second cultivated plot. Palms and flowering cacti added color and life
to the near prospect. Through the arbor a glimpse of the Tortilla
Mountains, forty miles away, held the eye. The Sweetwater, its path
across the plains outlined by the trees fringing its banks, flowed past
the ranch. Yucca palms and sahuaroes threw a scanty shade over the
garden.

Shortly after the arrival of the Allens in Arizona they were blessed
with a daughter, the first white child born in that region. They
waited for a Protestant clergyman to come along before christening her,
and, as such visits were few and far between, the child was beginning
to talk before she received a name. From a "cunning" habit she had of
repeating last words of questions put to her, her father provisionally
dubbed her Echo, which name, when the preacher came, he insisted upon
her retaining.

As Echo grew older, in order that she might have a companion, Colonel
Allen went to Kentucky and brought back with him a little orphan girl,
who was a distant relative of his wife. Polly Hope her name was, and
Polly Hope she insisted on remaining, though the Allens would gladly
have adopted her.

Colonel Allen trained the girls in all the craft of the plains, just as
if they were boys. He taught them to ride astride, to shoot, to rope
cattle. They accompanied him everywhere he wen