Senor Johnson rode in mufti. Of his cowboy days persisted still
the high-heeled boots and spurs, the broad Stetson hat, and the

fringed buckskin gauntlets.
The Colt's forty-five had been the last to go. Finally one

evening Senor Johnson received an express package. He opened it
before the undemonstrative Parker. It proved to contain a pocket

"gun"--a nickel-plated, thirty-eight calibre Smith & Wesson
"five-shooter." Senor Johnson examined it a little doubtfully.

In comparison with the six-shooter it looked like a toy.
"How do you, like her?" he inquired, handing the weapon to

Parker.
Parker turned it over and over, as a child a rattle. Then he

returned it to its owner.
"Senor," said he, "if ever you shoot me with that little old gun,

AND I find it out the same day, I'll just raise hell with you!"
"I don't reckon she'd INJURE a man much," agreed the Senor, "but

perhaps she'd call his attention."
However, the "little old gun" took its place, not in Senor

Johnson's hip pocket, but inside the front waistband of his
trousers, and the old shiny Colt's forty-five, with its worn

leather "Texas style" holster, became a bedroom ornament.
Thus, from a frontiersman dropped Senor Johnson to the status of

a property owner. In a general way he had to attend to his
interests before the cattlemen's association; he had to arrange

for the buying and shipping, and the rest was leisure. He could
now have gone away somewhere as far as time went. So can a fish

live in trees--as far as time goes. And in the daily riding,
riding, riding over the range he found the opportunity for

abstract thought which the frontier life had crowded aside.
CHAPTER TWO

THE SHAPES OF ILLUSION
Every day, as always, Senor Johnson rode abroad over the land.

His surroundings had before been accepted casually as a more or
less pertinent setting of action and condition. Now he sensed

some of the fascination of the Arizona desert.
He noticed many things before unnoticed. As he jingled loosely

along on his cow-horse, he observed how the animal waded fetlock
deep in the gorgeous orange California poppies, and then he

looked up and about, and saw that the rich colour carpeted the
landscape as far as his eye could reach, so that it seemed as

though he could ride on and on through them to the distant
Chiricahuas. Only, close under the hills, lay, unobtrusive, a

narrow streak of grey. And in a few hours he had reached the
streak of grey, and ridden out into it to find himself the centre

of a limitless alkali plain, so that again it seemed the valley
could contain nothing else of importance.

Looking back, Senor Johnson could discern a tenuous ribbon of
orange--the poppies. And perhaps ahead a little shadow blotted

the face of the alkali, which, being reached and entered, spread
like fire until it, too, filled the whole plain, until it, too,

arrogated to itself the right of typifying Soda Springs Valley as
a shimmering prairie of mesquite. Flowered upland, dead lowland,

brush, cactus, volcanic rock, sand, each of these for the time
being occupied the whole space, broad as the sea. In the circlet

of the mountains was room for many infinities.
Among the foothills Senor Johnson, for the first time,

appreciated colour. Hundreds of acres of flowers filled the
velvet creases of the little hills and washed over the smooth,

rounded slopes so accurately in the placing and manner of tinted
shadows that the mind had difficulty in believing the colour not

to have been shaded in actually by free sweeps of some gigantic
brush. A dozen shades of pinks and purples, a dozen of blues,

and then the flame reds, the yellows, and the vivid greens.
Beyond were the mountains in their glory of volcanic rocks, rich

as the tapestry of a Florentine palace. And, modifying all the
others, the tinted atmosphere of the south-west, refracting the

sun through the infinitesimal earth motes thrown up constantly by
the wind devils of the desert, drew before the scene a delicate

and gauzy veil of lilac, of rose, of saffron, of amethyst, or of
mauve, according to the time of day. Senor Johnson discovered

that looking at the landscapeupside down accentuated the colour
effects. It amused him vastly suddenly to bend over his saddle

horn, the top of his head nearly touching his horse's mane. The
distant mountains at once started out into redder prominence;

their shadows of purple deepened to the royal colour; the rose
veil thickened.

"She's the prettiest country God ever made!" exclaimed Senor
Johnson with entire conviction.

And no matter where he went, nor into how familiar country he
rode, the shapes of illusion offered always variety. One day the

Chiricahuas were a tableland; next day a series of castellated
peaks; now an anvil; now a saw tooth; and rarely they threw a

magnificent suspensionbridge across the heavens to their
neighbours, the ranges on the west. Lakes rippling in the wind

and breaking on the shore, cattle big as elephants or small as
rabbits, distances that did not exist and forests that never

were, beds of lava along the hills swearing to a cloud shadow,
while the sky was polished like a precious stone--these, and many

other beautiful and marvellous but empty shows the great desert
displayed lavishly, with the glitter and inconsequence of a

dream. Senor Johnson sat on his horse in the hot sun, his chin
in his band, his elbow on the pommel, watching it all with grave,

unshifting eyes.
Occasionally, belated, he saw the stars, the wonderful desert

stars, blazing clear and unflickering, like the flames of
candles. Or the moon worked her necromancies, hemming him in by

mountains ten thousand feet high through which there was no pass.
And then as he rode, the mountains shifted like the scenes in a

theatre, and he crossed the little sand dunes out from the dream
country to the adobe corrals of the home ranch.

All these things, and many others, Senor Johnson now saw for the
first time, although he had lived among them for twenty years.

It struck him with the freshness of a surprise. Also it reacted
chemically on his mental processes to generate a new power within

him. The new power, being as yet unapplied, made him uneasy and
restless and a little irritable.

He tried to show some of his wonders to Parker.
"Jed," said he, one day, "this is a great country."

"You KNOW it," replied the foreman.
"Those tourists in their nickel-plated Pullmans call this a

desert. Desert, hell! Look at them flowers!"
The foreman cast an eye on a glorioussilkenmantle of purple, a

hundred yards broad.
"Sure," he agreed; "shows what we could do if we only had a

little water."
And again: "Jed," began the Senor, "did you ever notice them

mountains?"
"Sure," agreed Jed.

"Ain't that a pretty colour?"
"You bet," agreed the foreman; "now you're talking! I always,

said they was mineralised enough to make a good prospect."
This was unsatisfactory. Senor Johnson grew more restless. His

critical eye began to take account of small details. At the
ranch house one evening he, on a sudden, bellowed loudly for

Sang, the Chinese servant.
"Look at these!" he roared, when Sang appeared.

Sang's eyes opened in bewilderment.
"There, and there!" shouted the cattleman. "Look at them old