"No wonder Jim has the finest ranch in Arizony," the cowboys were
wont to say, "with Josephine a irrigatin' it all the time."

Allen Hacienda was certainly a garden spot in that desert
country. The building was of the old Mexican style, an
architecture found, by centuries of experience, to be suited best
to the climate and the materials of the land. The house was only
one story in height. The rooms and outbuildings sprawled over a
wide expanse of ground. The walls were of native stone and adobe
clay; over them clambered grape-vines. In front of the home Mrs.
Allen had planted a garden. A 'dobe wall cut off the house from
the corral and the bunk-house. A heavy girder spanned the
distance from the low roof to the top of the barrier.
Latticework, supporting a grape-vine, formed, with a girder, a
gateway through which one could catch from the piazza a view of a
second cultivated plot. Palms and flowering cacti added color
and life to the near prospect. Through the arbor a glimpse of
the Tortilla Mountains, forty miles away, held the eye. The
Sweetwater, its path across the plains outlined by the trees
fringing its banks, flowed past the ranch. Yucca palms and
sahuaroes threw a scanty shade over the garden.

Shortly after the arrival of the Allens in Arizona they were
blessed with a daughter, the first white child born in that
region. They waited for a Protestant clergyman to come along
before christening her, and, as such visits were few and far
between, the child was beginning to talk before she received a
name. From a "cunning" habit she had of repeating last words of
questions put to her, her father provisionally dubbed her Echo,