The interior was cool and dim after the hot, glaring sunshine; and Bryant, having greeted Mrs.
Stevenson, sat down gratefully in a rocking-chair, glad to avail himself of the room's comfort.

Crude as an adobe house is both in appearance and in construction, it is admirably adapted to the climate of the arid Southwest; its flat dirt roof and thick walls built of sun-baked mud bricks, plastered within and smoothly surfaced without, defying alike the heat of midsummer and the icy blasts of winter and lasting in that dry clime half a century.

This ranch house of the Stevensons', originally built by some Mexican, as Bryant judged, had been standing twenty-five or thirty years and was still tight and staunch.
"Your creek's pretty dry, I see," the young fellow remarked afteratime, when they had exchanged news.
"By August there won't be any water in it at all," Stevenson said, "except a little that always runs in the canon.

I'll have to haul it from there then.

You see now why I can't keep stock here." His wife stopped the needle with which she mended an apron while they talked, and looked out of a window.