The Wichita daily eagle. [volume] (Wichita, Kan.) 1890-1906, 1903-02-22
WANTED FRESH AIR
Experience and Expressions of overs
Outdoors.

Experience and Expressions of overs
| Outdoors.
| After three days and four nights in a
| sleeping-car it is good to breathe air
| again. Not that 1 mean to speak i'll of the
| modern necessity known in railway Offices
as sleeper; it has done me too many
a service; but for all that-weIl. as 1
| said, it is pleasant to breathe the air
again.
1 thought so this January afternoon as
I sat upon the top rail "a pretty thin
| boarO Of tall fence at the top of what
/ take to be one of the highest elevations
| Gt would be exceeding the truth, per-
| haps, to call this venerable but young and
vigorous Texas city, known in geogra-
| phies and gazeteers as San Antonio, but
among railroad men, whose time and
breath are precious as San Antoine
The city itself lay before me, and a
most excellent showing it made, with it's
many stately and handsome buildings and
its general air of prosperity; but for the
most part 1 looked beyond it, or in other
directions. The landscape was wide, which
ever way L turned, and the transparency
of the atmosphere, of kind never seen
in New England except on some days in
year made it the wider and more allur-
ing 1t surprised me to see imposing pub
lie buildings scattered about over the
country. The nearest of them must have
been several miles from the town and
each of them, so far as / could see, stood
entirely by itself. Here and there also,
miles apart, were fine dwelling houses,
with out-buidingS and windmils; each
like the public institutions just mentioned,
standing alone, as if its proprietor We're
also the proprietor of the entire tract
of country roundabout Rich mems
ranches, they would perhaps be called. All
these, or most of them would have been
invisible from my fence-ran perch but for
the fact, which really made the strange
ness of the whole spectacle to Northern
mans eyes, that the rolling land is all I'M
wooded-a broad landscape, stretching
away and away. north, south, east and
west. The slopes look, at a little dis
tance-just as the one on which | was
now sitting had looked to me half a mile
back-as if they might be planted with
young peach orchards. They are really
covered loosely with the shrubs ten or
fifteen feet high, now budded and in pale
green leaf with lower shrubs of different
species, mostly thorny. scattered loosely
among them. the whole constituting Cor
so / SUPPOSED what is known in this part
of the world as chaparral; which is very
like what in our own Northern country
we speak of, less respectful as scrub"
IT is a godsend to a man on my errand
that chaparral. as IL grows about San
Antonio at all events, is not a dense
thicket. 1t can be walked through or rid
den through in all directions with perfect
ease, though one cannot keep a straight
course more than a rod or two together
had been walking over just such hill
half an hour before. circling one cluster
of shrubs after another. opera glass in
hand. ready for any bird that might show
itself il was as likely as not to be
strangely when all at once-how Il came
about / shall never be able to tell-there.
Just before me on the ground twenty or
thirty feet away. stood one of the birds
that I had most desired to see in this
novel Southwestern world-a road-runner
L have found some puzzles since my ar
rival in San Antonio. but this was not
one of them. AS our good common saying
is the fellow looked las natural as life"
Mr.. FuerteS' drawing had stepped out Of
the book. l could have shouted with
pleasure.
The bird was true to its name There
was no road. to be sure. but he started off !
at once on a lively trot; then. within ten |
or fifteen feet. he stopped short. lifted !
his ridiculously long tail till 1t stood at
right angles with his body-the white |
4,
ers making a brave show in spite Of the !
almost indecent ahsurdity of his attitude. |
Two or three times he repeated these ma
noeuvers. and then. without my knowing |
how he did it. he escaped me altogether, !
although he bit of shrubbery into which 1
he had vanished was only a few feet in |
az eter. Never mind ! thought II \
have seen him And he wes every whit /
as odd and absurd as my fancy had paint |
e6 him.
The road-runner. 4 should be said. Is an /
overgrown member Of the cookoo family. /
Its length from the tip Of its bill TO the /
end Of its tail is about two feet. II wears /
what 1 may describe as a frightered-look- /
ing crest its plUmsge is conspicuously /
notified. and. what gives il it's special /
character. its tail is a foot long Mrs. I
Bailey well says. it is "one OF the most
original and entertaining of Western
birds The newcomer is amazed when /
the long-tailed creature darts out Of the
brush and races the horses down the road.
easily keeping ahead as they trot. and
when tired turns into the brush and
throws his tail over his hack 10 stop him
self.
Ny birds performance was less theatri-
cal than that perhaps because was OF
foot. perhaps because OF the absence Of n
but was well pleased
II is noticeable how birds. not less than
men. tend to become specialists To ac-
complish one thing supremely well that
Is certainly the way 70 make ones self
famous. And that il what the rosd-runner