Six or eight years earlier, four young men had left New York on a
Galveston steamer, their departure being attended by such an assemblage
of young women that on the second day out their companions of the voyage
confided the supposition that it had been a "bridal party." That little
Spanish-American word ravaging our coasts and carrying off the pride of
the youth has to answer for many such bridal parties, whose tours have
been followed with pins and colored pencils and eyes more eager than
those of mothers-in-law. In a month or so the young men had pitched a
wall-tent within a day's ride of the Rio Grande, and were seriously
occupied in sacrificing each other's feelings on the altar of
experimental cookery, in herding sheep with the assistance of paper
novels, and in writing exceedingly long letters to the North. This
wall-tent was the larva of the ranch. But the arid southern country
proved inconvenient, and collecting their effects in a prairie-schooner
and driving their flocks before them, they effected a masterly change of
base, which brought them two hundred miles to the northward and set them
down in a delightful pasture-land, watered by three pretty creeks, near
one of which they erected an adobe hut. This solitary house on a broad
flat, an object of amazement to wandering hordes of cattle, was the
ranch during a most interesting period, and its thatched roof and
somewhat fetid walls became for the occupants overgrown with fine
clusters of association. Within a few miles of its site the present
village took shape.

The country was a frankly monotonous conformation of alternating hills
and valleys,--"divides" and "draws,"--with wide flats near the creeks.
Gulches, more or less deep, down the valley-lines of the draws, and
traversing the flats to the creeks,--the so-called _arroyos_,--were a