The older men went inside to Major Hinchman’s big living room where, over some Mexican stogies, they discussed Neyani and his Black Panther and gossiped over old Army days. Sid and Scotty went out to help Big John with the horses and hounds and then explored the ranch patio. It was all as Spanish as old Mexico. Heavy and age-worn oak furniture--the real Mission--stone _metates_ for grinding corn, great red _ollas_ or porous jars for cooling water by evaporation, striped serapes and Navaho blankets, Apache and Pima baskets; saddles, raitas and ornamental embossed Mexican leather gear--the horse was King here! The place reeked of those old strenuous border days of the Southwest, and the ranch seemed to have imbibed equally of the customs and usages of the early Spanish and Indian possessors of the country. In turn, the boys peeped in the various doorways; the farriery with a smoking forge and laboring bellows; the bunk house with an interminable game of greasy cards going on; the saddlery, where a weazened old sinner of a Sonoran bent over his leather work; and the great kitchen, where dried beef and hams hung from the smoky rafters, and long braids of corn, peppers, desert onions and dried berries festooned the walls. There were bins of pinyon nuts, flour, _metate_-ground Indian meal, sugar, coffee and red beans--the ranch could stand a year’s siege if you asked Lum Looke, the Chinese cook who presided! After a time Major Hinchman sought them out at the stables in the patio, where Ruler and his progeny had been made comfortable in an empty stall. “Say, boys,” he grinned at them with a quizzically apologetic smile, “I’m mighty sorry--but thar ain’t a derned thing to eat in the ranch! Nope, not a doggone thing!” he insisted whimsically. “You’ll have to rustle your own grub. Now, Jake, thar, he was tellin’ me of a couple of deer over the river in those cottonwoods,” he confided, in an elaborate stage whisper. “Suppose you boys get you’ rifles an’ rustle us a little venison? You!--_Jake!_” he roared, seeing the delighted smiles on Sid’s and Scotty’s faces. Jake came straddling out of the bunk house, the sunlight sheening on his glossy black fur chaps as he crossed the patio. “Jake, you take these boys across the river and fetch us a deer,” he roared, turning to go back to the Colonel to continue their plans for the trip to come. A high-riding sun bathed the desert in floods of light and color as they rode out of the patio. The pink layer-cake mountains across the river rose high and near, now. Streaks of yellow and blue, in horizontal lines, crossed the uniform red of their bare and jagged conformation. From a bluff near Hinchman’s they could survey a wide bend of the river (which was little more than a wide, fordable brook) and here was green grass land, with cattle dotted over it. Back of it was the corresponding bluff of the opposite bank, fringed with mesquite, oaks, cottonwoods, juniper and pinyons.