I Lay With Eyes Wide Open, Watching For The
Day To Come, And Resolving Each Minute That If I Ever Escaped
Alive From That Lonely River-Bottom With Its Burning Alkali, And
Its Millions Of Howling Coyotes, I Would Never, Never Risk Being
Placed In Such A Situation Again.
At dawn everybody got up and dressed.
I looked in my small
hand-mirror, and it seemed to me my hair had turned a greyish
color, and while it was not exactly white, the warm chestnut
tinge never came back into it, after that day and night of
terror. My eyes looked back at me large and hollow from the
small glass, and I was in that state when it is easy to imagine
the look of Death in one's own face. I think sometimes it comes,
after we have thought ourselves near the borders. And I surely
had been close to them the day before.
If perchance any of my readers have followed this narrative so
far, and there be among them possibly any men, young or old, I
would say to such ones: "Desist! For what I am going to tell
about in this chapter, and possibly another, concerns nobody but
women, and my story will now, for awhile, not concern itself with
the Eighth Foot, nor the army, nor the War Department, nor the
Interior Department, nor the strategic value of Sunset Crossing,
which may now be a railroad station, for all I know. It is simply
a story of my journey from the far bank of the Little Colorado to
Fort Whipple, and then on, by a change of orders, over mountains
and valleys, cactus plains and desert lands, to the banks of the
Great Colorado.
My attitude towards the places I travelled through was naturally
influenced by the fact that I had a young baby in my arms the
entire way, and that I was not able to endure hardship at that
time. For usually, be it remembered, at that period of a child's
life, both mother and infant are not out of the hands of the
doctor and trained nurse, to say nothing of the assistance so
gladly rendered by those near and dear,
The morning of the 28th of April dawned shortly after midnight,
as mornings in Arizona generally do at that season, and after a
hasty camp breakfast, and a good deal of reconnoitering on the
part of the officers, who did not seem to be exactly satisfied
about the Mexican's knowledge of the ford, they told him to push
his pony in, and cross if he could.
He managed to pick his way across and back, after a good deal of
floundering, and we decided to try the ford. First they hitched
up ten mules to one of the heavily loaded baggage-wagons, the
teamster cracked his whip, and in they went. But the quicksand
frightened the leaders, and they lost their courage. Now when a
mule loses courage, in the water, he puts his head down and is
done for.
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