I simply could not go on enduring these unmitigated and
unreasonable hardships.
The Florence man staid over at the post a day or so to rest his
ponies. I bade him good-bye and told him to take care of those
brave little beasts, which had travelled seventy miles without
rest, to bring us to our destination. He nodded pleasantly and
drove away. "A queer customer," I observed to Jack.
"Yes," answered he, "they told me in Florence that he was a 'road
agent' and desperado, but there did not seem to be anyone else,
and my orders were peremptory, so I took him. I knew the ponies
could pull us through, by the looks of them; and road agents are
all right with army officers, they know they wouldn't get
anything if they held 'em up."
"How much did he charge you for the trip?" I asked.
"Sixteen dollars," was the reply. And so ended the episode.
Except that I looked back to Picket Post with a sort of horror, I
thought no more about it.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE EIGHTH FOOT LEAVES ARIZONA
And now after the eight days of most distressing heat, and the
fatigue of all sorts and varieties of travelling, the nights
spent in a stage-coach or at a desert inn, or in the road agent's
buckboard, holding always my little son close to my side, came
six days more of journeying down the valley of the Gila.
We took supper in Phoenix, at a place known as "Devine's." I was
hearing a good deal about Phoenix; for even then, its gardens,
its orchards and its climate were becoming famous, but the season
of the year was unpropitious to form a favorable opinion of that
thriving place, even if my opinions of Arizona, with its
parched-up soil and insufferable heat, had not been formed
already.
We crossed the Gila somewhere below there, and stopped at our old
camping places, but the entire valley was seething hot, and the
remembrance of the December journey seemed but an aggravating
dream.
We joined Captain Corliss and the company at Antelope Station,
and in two more days were at Yuma City. By this time, the
Southern Pacific Railroad had been built as far as Yuma, and a
bridge thrown across the Colorado at this point. It seemed an
incongruity. And how burning hot the cars looked, standing there
in the Arizona sun!
After four years in that Territory, and remembering the days,
weeks, and even months spent in travelling on the river, or
marching through the deserts, I could not make the Pullman cars
seem a reality.
