There was a good ranch
there, kept by Hunt and Dudley, Englishmen, I believe. I did not
see them, but I wondered who they were and why they staid in such
a place. They were absent at the time; perhaps they had mines or
something of the sort to look after. One is always imagining
things about people who live in such extraordinary places. At all
events, whatever Messrs. Hunt and Dudley were doing down there,
their ranch was clean and attractive, which was more than could
be said of the place where we stopped the next night, a place
called Tyson's Wells. We slept in our tent that night, for of all
places on the earth a poorly kept ranch in Arizona is the most
melancholy and uninviting. It reeks of everything unclean,
morally and physically. Owen Wister has described such a place in
his delightful story, where the young tenderfoot dances for the
amusement of the old habitues.
One more day's travel across the desert brought us to our El
Dorado.
CHAPTER XVIII
EHRENBERG ON THE COLORADO
Under the burning mid-day sun of Arizona, on May 16th, our six
good mules, with the long whip cracking about their ears, and the
ambulance rattling merrily along, brought us into the village of
Ehrenberg. There was one street, so called, which ran along on
the river bank, and then a few cross streets straggling back into
the desert, with here and there a low adobe casa.
