Roger Smith, with his plebeian surname and unillustrious "tanner" grandfather, was by no means a suitable husband for her motherless niece, to whom, as the head of her brother's household, she had for years filled a parent's place. Louise Hemmenshaw, as the good lady shrewdly guessed, was the magnet that drew this undeclared lover to Mesilla Valley. During the preceding winter they had met at many social functions in Boston and Cambridge, and he had become the willing captive of her bow and spear. He had never told his love. The social discrepancy between the lovely aristocrat and Roger--the grandson of Roger the Tanner--was too wide to be easily overstepped. Ostensibly the Harvard man had come to New Mexico to recruit his spent energies; but in his heart of hearts he knew that dearer than health was the hope of winning the heart of Louise Hemmenshaw. Already his native refinement and charm of manner had commended him to Miss Paulina; and now, his prowess in the day's adventure had made her, for good and all, his warm friend. As to her niece, he told himself, as, that night, by the light of a low moon, he took his way to Alamo Ranch, recalling the tender pressure of the invalid's white hand, when, with a rosy blush, she bade him good-night, that in his wooing he had to-day "scored one;" and with the confident egotism of presumptuous mortals, when events play unexpectedly into their hands, he decided that Fate had prearranged this timely call of his on the Hemmenshaws, and had timed the arrival of the Apache at that opportune hour, with an especial view to the fulfilment of his own cherished wishes. CHAPTER VI Another two weeks of lighter Koshare festivities had again brought round the more solid fortnightly entertainment of the Club. Its members duly assembled, the president in his chair, and the secretary at attention, Mr. Morehouse thus began his second paper. "Before Texas," said he, "became a part of an independent republic, and until after the Mexican war (when we forced Mexico to sell us all California, New Mexico, and Arizona, nearly all of Utah and Nevada, besides Texas, and the greater part of Colorado), Mexico proper reached way up here; and it is thought by some archaeologists that the mesas or table-mountain land especially characterizing the New Mexican landscape may have afforded the suggestion for the Teocallis of the great pyramid-like mounds, with terraced sides, built by the Aztecs. Some scholars have even convinced themselves that the Aztec culture must have originated here in the North. Others wholly discard the conclusion. "Mr. Baxter, in his valuable and interesting book of Mexican travel, says, decidedly, 'The New Mexican Indians were not Aztecs, and Montezuma had no more to do with New Mexico than he did with New England.' And with this assertion I think we must all, perforce, agree.