Helen May had changed a good deal in the past two or three weeks. Now
when she stared away and away over the desert and barren slope and ridges
and mountain, she did not feel that she hated them. Instead, she saw that
the yellow of the desert, the brown of the slopes, and the black of the
distant granite ledges basseting from bleak hills were more beautiful
than the tidy little plots of tilled ground she used to think so lovely.
There was something hypnotic in these bald distances. She could not read,
when she was out like this; she could only look and think and dream.
She wished that she might ride out over it sometime, away over to the
mountains, perhaps, as far as she could see. She fell to dreaming of the
old days when this was Spanish territory, and the king gave royal grants
of land to his favorites: for instance, all the country lying between two
mountain ranges, to where a river cut across and formed a natural
boundary. Holman Sommers had told her about the old Spanish grants, and
how many of the vast estates of Mexican "cattle kings" and "sheep kings"
were still preserved almost intact, just as they had been when this was a
part of Mexico.
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