Those toy
hills were San Mateo and Magdalena. Pringle had passed that way on a
bygone year, headed east. He was going west, now.
"I'm too prosperous here," he had explained to Beebe and Ballinger,
his partners on Rainbow. "I'm tedious to myself. Guess I'll take a
_pasear_ back to Prescott. Railroad? Who, me? Why, son, I like to
travel when I go anywheres. Just starting and arriving don't delight
me any. Besides, I don't know that strip along the border. I'll ride."
It was a tidy step to Prescott--say, as far as from Philadelphia to
Savannah, or from Richmond to Augusta; but John Wesley had made many
such rides in the Odyssey of his wonder years. Some of them had been
made in haste. But there was no haste now. Sam Bass, his corn-fed
sorrel, was hardly less sleek and sturdy than at the start, though
a third of the way was behind him. Pringle rode by easy stages, and
where he found himself pleased, there he tarried for a space.
With another friendly nod to the northward hills that marked a day of
his past, Pringle turned his eyes to the westlands, outspread and vast
before him. To his right the desert stretched away, a mighty plain
dotted with low hills, rimmed with a curving, jagged range. Beyond
that range was a nothingness, a hiatus that marked the sunken valley
of the Rio Grande; beyond that, a headlong infinity of unknown ranges,
tier on tier, yellow or brown or blue; broken, tumbled, huddled,
scattered, with gulfs between to tell of unseen plains and hidden
happy valleys--altogether giving an impression of rushing toward him,
resistless, like the waves of a stormy sea.
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