Search -
Los Cerritos: A Romance Of The Modern Time (1890)
Los Cerritos A Romance Of The Modern Time - 1890 Author:Gertrude Atherton General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1890 Original Publisher: John W. Lovell Company Subjects: Fiction / Historical Fiction / Romance / General Fiction / Romance / Contemporary Fiction / Westerns Juvenile Fiction / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrat... more »ions and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: III. A BROAD DOMAIN. The Eancho de los Cerritos was a tract of land covering some fifty thousand acres. A tradition existed that it had once been owned by a Mexican grandee, hence its possession of name and boundary line; but it had long been known as government land and taken up by squatters. The ground was fertile, but after the many mouths were fed and the taxes paid there was little to lay by, and the squatter was always poor. Meat and flour were dear, for the nearest town was thirty miles away, and he could not afford to farm more than a few acres nor to raise cattle for killing. The hog being prolific was not so infrequent a delicacy, and one or two of the colony had a band of sheep. There is little to spur the energies of the settler in these remote districts. Whatever involuntary prompting of ambition may be felt in is soon narrowed to the successful raising of a crop or to compassing an occasional dinner of beef. The Cerritos farmers' one idea of society was to meet occasionally at the Aguitas, a halfway house for the stages, and marking the eastern boundary line of the Rancho. Here they would drink and gossip and idle, with no desire for anything better in life; and when unknown men came to gamble their ill-gotten gains it meant to them what a circus does to a country town. The ranch itself was the very flower of a territory that might have dropped straight from celestial hunting-grounds. Those fairy-like...« less