CHAPTER III


The town of Bartolo slumbered in the July sunshine. Nothing stirred on
its one long street, lined with scarcely a break on either side by
mud-plastered houses that made a continuous brown wall, marked at
intervals by a door or pierced by a window; nothing stirred, neither
in front of Menocal's large frame store at the upper end of it, with
the little bank adjoining, nor before the small courthouse grounds
across the way, where the huge old cottonwoods spread their shade, nor
along the entire length of the beaten street down to Gomez's
blacksmith shop and Martinez's saloon across from each other at the
lower end; nothing, not even the pair of burros drowsing in the shade
of the wall, or the dogs lying before doors, or the goats a-kneel by
the saloon, or the fowls nested down in the dust. Only the Pinas
River, issuing from the black cañon a mile or so above, was in motion;
and, indeed, it appeared to partake of the general somnolence, barely
rippling along its gravelly bed, shallow and shrunken, and giving
forth but an indolent glitter as it flowed past the town. The day was
hot and it was the hour of the siesta, therefore everything
slept--everything, man, beast and fowl, from Menocal, who was snoring
in his hammock on the vine-clad veranda of his big stuccoed house just
beyond the store at the head of the street, to the goats at the foot
of it by the silent saloon.

Bryant, descending from the mesa into the river bottom and riding into