"
"Washout?" said I. "Where?"
"At the dry bridge beyond."
Well, to make a long story short, we took her on the engine--she was wet
through--and went on to the dry bridge. This was a little wooden
structure in a sag, about a mile away, and we found that the storm we
had encountered farther back had done bad work at each end of the
bridge. We did not cross that night, but after placing signals well
behind us and ahead of the washout, we waited until morning, the three
of us sitting in the cab of the "Mary Ann," chatting as if we were old
acquaintances.
This young girl, whose fortunes had been so strangely cast with ours,
was the daughter of Senor Juan Arboles, a rich old Spanish Don who owned
a fine place and immense herds of sheep over on the Rio Pecos, some ten
miles west of the road. She was being educated in some Catholic school
or convent at Trinidad, and had the evening before alighted at the big
corrals, a few miles below, where she was met by one of her father's
Mexican rancheros, who led her saddle broncho. They had started on their
fifteen-mile ride in the cool of the evening, and following the road
back for a few miles were just striking off toward the distant hedge of
cotton woods that lined the little stream by her home when the storm
came upon them.
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