Even the fact that Santa Fé had been for a period under the fostering
wings of the American eagle did not make it grow much. Westward-ho
emigrants halted there to refit and buy cattle and provisions; but always
started resolutely on again, westward-hoing across the continent. Nobody
seemed to want to stay in Santa Fé, except the aforesaid less than five
thousand inhabitants, who were able to endure the place because they had
never seen any other, and who had become a part of its gray, dirty, lazy
lifelessness and despondency.

For a wonder, this old atom of a metropolis had lately had an increase of
population, which was nearly as great a wonder as Sarah having a son when
she was "well stricken in years." A couple of new-comers--not a man nor
woman less than a couple--now stood on the flat roof of one of the largest
of the sun-baked brick houses. By great good luck, moreover, these two
were, I humbly trust, worthy of attention. The one was interesting because
she was the handsomest girl in Santa Fé, and would have been considered a
handsome girl anywhere; the other was interesting because she was a
remarkable woman, and even, as Mr. Jefferson Brick might have phrased it,
"one of the most remarkable women in our country, sir." At least so she
judged, and judged it too with very considerable confidence, being one of
those persons who say, "If I know myself, and I think I do."

The beauty was of a mixed type. She combined the blonde and the brunette
fashions of loveliness. You might guess at the first glance that she had
in her the blood of both the Teutonic and the Latin races. While her skin
was clear and rosy, and her curling hair was of a light and bright
chestnut, her long, shadowy eyelashes were almost black, and her eyes were
of a deep hazel, nearly allied to blackness. Her form had the height of
the usual American girl, and the round plumpness of the usual Spanish