shading the water-hole from the desert sun. The place is altogether
neat and habitable. It is rather a surprise to the chance wayfarer to
find the ranch uninhabited. As desolate as a stranded steamer on a mud
bank, it stands in the center of several hundred acres of desert,
incapable, without irrigation, of producing anything more edible than
lizards and horned toads. Why a homesteader should have chosen to
locate there is a mystery. His reason for abandoning the place is
glaringly obvious. Though failure be written in every angle and nook
of the homestead, it is the failure of large-hearted enterprise, of
daring to attempt, of striving to make the desert bloom, and not the
failure of indolence or sloth.

Western humor like Western topography is apt to be more or less rugged.
Between the high gateposts of the yard enclosure there is a great,
twelve-foot sign lettered in black. It reads: "American Hotel." A
band of happy cowboys appropriated the sign when on a visit to
Antelope, pressed a Mexican freighter to pack it thirty miles across
the desert, and nailed it above the gateway of the water-hole ranch.
It is a standing joke among the cattle- and sheep-men of the Concho
Valley.

Sundown sat up and gazed about. The rabbit, startled out of its
ordinary resourcefulness, stiffened. The delicate nostrils ceased
twitching. "Good mornin', little fella! You been travelin' all night
too?" And Sundown yawned and stretched. Down the road sped a brown
exclamation mark with a white dot at its visible end. "Guess he don't
have to travel nights to get 'most anywhere," laughed Sundown. He
kicked back his blankets and rose stiffly. The luxury of his yawn was
stifled as he saw below him the ranchhouse with some strange kind of a
sign above its gate. "If that's the hotel," he said as he corded his