

E-text prepared by Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders



A TEXAS MATCHMAKER

by

ANDY ADAMS

Author of 'The Log of a Cowboy'

ILLUSTRATED BY E. BOYD SMITH

1904







[Illustration: ROLLING THE BULL OVER LIKE A HOOP (page 207)]




TO

FRANK H. EARNEST

MOUNTED INSPECTOR U.S. CUSTOMS SERVICE

LAREDO, TEXAS




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

    I. LANCE LOVELACE

   II. SHEPHERD'S FERRY

  III. LAS PALOMAS

   IV. CHRISTMAS

    V. A PIGEON HUNT

   VI. SPRING OF '76

  VII. SAN JACINTO DAY

 VIII. A CAT HUNT ON THE FRIO

   IX. THE ROSE AND ITS THORN

    X. AFTERMATH

   XI. A TURKEY BAKE

  XII. SUMMER OF '77

 XIII. HIDE HUNTING

  XIV. A TWO YEARS' DROUTH

   XV. IN COMMEMORATION

  XVI. MATCHMAKING

 XVII. WINTER AT LAS PALOMAS

XVIII. AN INDIAN SCARE

  XIX. HORSE BRANDS

   XX. SHADOWS

  XXI. INTERLOCUTORY PROCEEDINGS

 XXII. SUNSET





LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


ROLLING THE BULL OVER LIKE A HOOP

WE GOT THE AMBULANCE OFF BEFORE SUNRISE

FLASHED A MESSAGE BACK

GAVE THE WILDEST HORSES THEIR HEADS

HE SPED DOWN THE COURSE

UTTERING A SINGLE PIERCING SNORT





CHAPTER I

LANCE LOVELACE


When I first found employment with Lance Lovelace, a Texas cowman, I
had not yet attained my majority, while he was over sixty. Though not
a native of Texas, "Uncle Lance" was entitled to be classed among its
pioneers, his parents having emigrated from Tennessee along with a party
of Stephen F. Austin's colonists in 1821. The colony with which his
people reached the state landed at Quintana, at the mouth of the Brazos
River, and shared the various hardships that befell all the early Texan
settlers, moving inland later to a more healthy locality. Thus the
education of young Lovelace was one of privation. Like other boys in
pioneer families, he became in turn a hewer of wood or drawer of
water, as the necessities of the household required, in reclaiming the
wilderness. When Austin hoisted the new-born Lone Star flag, and called
upon the sturdy pioneers to defend it, the adventurous settlers came
from every quarter of the territory, and among the first who responded
to the call to arms was young Lance Lovelace. After San Jacinto, when
the fighting was over and the victory won, he laid down his arms,
and returned to ranching with the same zeal and energy. The first
legislature assembled voted to those who had borne arms in behalf of the
new republic, lands in payment for their services. With this land scrip
for his pay, young Lovelace, in company with others, set out for the
territory lying south of the Nueces. They were a band of daring spirits.
The country was primitive and fascinated them, and they remained. Some
settled on the Frio River, though the majority crossed the Nueces, many
going as far south as the Rio Grande. The country was as large as the
men were daring, and there was elbow room for all and to spare. Lance
Lovelace located a ranch a few miles south of the Nueces River, and,
from the cooing of the doves in the encinal, named it Las Palomas.

"When I first settled here in 1838," said Uncle Lance to me one morning,
as we rode out across the range, "my nearest neighbor lived forty miles
up the river at Fort Ewell. Of course there were some Mexican families
nearer, north on the Frio, but they don't count. Say, Tom, but she was a
purty country then! Why, from those hills yonder, any morning you could
see a thousand antelope in a band going into the river to drink. And
wild turkeys? Well, the first few years we lived here, whole flocks
roosted every night in that farther point of the encinal. And in the
winter these prairies were just flooded with geese and brant. If you
wanted venison, all you had to do was to ride through those mesquite
thickets north of the river to jump a hundred deer in a morning's ride.
Oh, I tell you she was a land of plenty."

The pioneers of Texas belong to a day and generation which has almost
gone. If strong arms and daring spirits were required to conquer the
wilderness, Nature seemed generous in the supply; for nearly all were
stalwart types of the inland viking. Lance Lovelace, when I first met
him, would have passed for a man in middle life. Over six feet in
height, with a rugged constitution, he little felt his threescore
years, having spent his entire lifetime in the outdoor occupation of a
ranchman. Living on the wild game of the country, sleeping on the ground
by a camp-fire when his work required it, as much at home in the saddle
as by his ranch fireside, he was a romantic type of the strenuous
pioneer.

He was a man of simple tastes, true as tested steel in his friendships,
with a simple honest mind which followed truth and right as unerringly
as gravitation. In his domestic affairs, however, he was unfortunate.
The year after locating at Las Palomas, he had returned to his former
home on the Colorado River, where he had married Mary Bryan, also of the
family of Austin's colonists. Hopeful and happy they returned to their
new home on the Nueces, but before the first anniversary of their
wedding day arrived, she, with her first born, were laid in the same
grave. But grief does not kill, and the young husband bore his loss as
brave men do in living out their allotted day. But to the hour of his
death the memory of Mary Bryan mellowed him into a child, and, when
unoccupied, with every recurring thought of her or the mere mention of
her name, he would fall into deep reverie, lasting sometimes for hours.
And although he contracted two marriages afterward, they were simply
marriages of convenience, to which, after their termination, he
frequently referred flippantly, sometimes with irreverence, for they
were unhappy alliances.

On my arrival at Las Palomas, the only white woman on the ranch was
"Miss Jean," a spinster sister of its owner, and twenty years his
junior. After his third bitter experience in the lottery of matrimony,
evidently he gave up hope, and induced his sister to come out and
preside as the mistress of Las Palomas. She was not tall like her
brother, but rather plump for her forty years. She had large gray eyes,
with long black eyelashes, and she had a trick of looking out from under
them which was both provoking and disconcerting, and no doubt many an
admirer had been deceived by those same roguish, laughing eyes. Every
man, Mexican and child on the ranch was the devoted courtier of Miss
Jean, for she was a lovable woman; and in spite of her isolated life and
the constant plaguings of her brother on being a spinster, she fitted
neatly into our pastoral life. It was these teasings of her brother that
gave me my first inkling that the old ranchero was a wily matchmaker,
though he religiously denied every such accusation. With a remarkable
complacency, Jean Lovelace met and parried her tormentor, but her
brother never tired of his hobby while there was a third person to
listen.

Though an unlettered man, Lance Lovelace had been a close observer of
humanity. The big book of Life had been open always before him, and he
had profited from its pages. With my advent at Las Palomas, there were
less than half a dozen books on the ranch, among them a copy of Bret
Harte's poems and a large Bible.

"That book alone," said he to several of us one chilly evening, as we
sat around the open fireplace, "is the greatest treatise on humanity
ever written. Go with me to-day to any city in any country in
Christendom, and I'll show you a man walk up the steps of his church
on Sunday who thanks God that he's better than his neighbor. But you
needn't go so far if you don't want to. I reckon if I could see myself,
I might show symptoms of it occasionally. Sis here thanks God daily