The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On

Eugene Manlove Rhodes
The Desire of the Moth; and The
Come On
by Eugene Manlove
Rhodes

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Come On
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Title: The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On
Author: Eugene Manlove Rhodes
Release Date: April 8, 2004 [EBook #11960]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE MOTH ***

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THE DESIRE OF THE MOTH AND THE COME ON
BY EUGENE MANLOVE RHODES
ILLUSTRATIONS BY H.T. DUNN

ILLUSTRATIONS

They were riding hard
"Gentlemen--be seated!"

THE DESIRE OF THE MOTH
Chapter I
"Little Next Door--her years are few-- Loves me, more than her elders
do; Says, my wrinkles become me so; Marvels much at the tales I know.
Says, we shall marry when she is grown----"
The little happy song stopped short. John Wesley Pringle, at the mesa's
last headland, drew rein to adjust his geography. This was new country
to him.
Close behind, Organ Mountain flung up a fantasy of spires,
needle-sharp and bare and golden. The long straight range--saw-toothed
limestone save for this twenty-mile sheer upheaval of the
Organ--stretched away to north and south against the unclouded sky,
till distance turned the barren gray to blue-black, to blue, to misty haze;
till the sharp, square-angled masses rounded to hillocks--to a blur--a
wavy line--nothing.
More than a hundred miles to the north-west, two midget mountains

wavered in the sky. John Wesley nodded at their unforgotten shapes
and pieced this vast landscape to the patchwork map in his head. Those
toy hills were San Mateo and Magdalena. Pringle had passed that way
on a bygone year, headed east. He was going west, now.
"I'm too prosperous here," he had explained to Beebe and Ballinger, his
partners on Rainbow. "I'm tedious to myself. Guess I'll take a pasear
back to Prescott. Railroad? Who, me? Why, son, I like to travel when I
go anywheres. Just starting and arriving don't delight me any. Besides, I
don't know that strip along the border. I'll ride."
It was a tidy step to Prescott--say, as far as from Philadelphia to
Savannah, or from Richmond to Augusta; but John Wesley had made
many such rides in the Odyssey of his wonder years. Some of them had
been made in haste. But there was no haste now. Sam Bass, his
corn-fed sorrel, was hardly less sleek and sturdy than at the start,
though a third of the way was behind him. Pringle rode by easy stages,
and where he found himself pleased, there he tarried for a space.
With another friendly nod to the northward hills that marked a day of
his past, Pringle turned his eyes to the westlands, outspread and vast
before him. To his right the desert stretched away, a mighty plain
dotted with low hills, rimmed with a curving, jagged range. Beyond
that range was a nothingness, a hiatus that marked the sunken valley of
the Rio Grande; beyond that, a headlong infinity of unknown ranges,
tier on tier, yellow or brown or blue; broken, tumbled, huddled,
scattered, with gulfs between to tell of unseen plains and hidden happy
valleys--altogether giving an impression of rushing toward him,
resistless, like the waves of a stormy sea.
At his feet the plain broke away sharply, in a series of steplike sandy
benches, to where the Rio Grande bore quartering across the desert,
turning to the Mexican sea; the Mesilla Valley here, a slender ribbon of
mossy green, broidered with loops of flashing river--a ribbon six miles
by forty, orchard, woodland, and green field, greener for the desolate
gray desert beyond and the yellow hills of sand edging the valley floor.
Below him Las Uvas, chief town of the valley, lay basking in the sun,
tiny square and street bordered with greenery: its domino houses

white-walled in the sun, with larger splashes of red from courthouse or
church or school.
Far on the westering desert, beyond the valley, Pringle saw a white
feather of smoke from a toiling train; beyond that a twisting gap in the
blue of the westmost range.
"That's our road." He lifted his bridle rein. "Amble along, Sam!"
To that amble he crooned to himself, pleasantly, half-dreamily--as if he
voiced indirectly some inner thought--quaint snatches of old song:
"She came to the gate and she peeped in-- Grass and the weeds up to
her chin; Said, 'A rake and a hoe and a fantail plow Would suit you
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