The stout-hearted and confiding girl allowed the second trial,
and between the steamboat agent, the Lieutenant, and the red
wine, the aching molar was finally extracted.
This was a serious and painful occurrence. It did not cause any
of us to laugh, at the time. I am sure that Ellen, at least,
never saw the comical side of it.
When it was all over, I thanked Fisher, and Jack beamed upon me
with: "You see, Mattie, my case of instruments did come in handy,
after all."
Encouraged by success, he applied for a pannier of medicines, and
the Ehrenberg citizens soon regarded him as a healer. At a
certain hour in the morning, the sick ones came to his office,
and he dispensed simple drugs to them and was enabled to do much
good. He seemed to have a sort of intuitive knowledge about
medicines and performed some miraculous cures, but acquired
little or no facility in the use of the language.
I was often called in as interpreter, and with the help of the
sign language, and the little I knew of Spanish, we managed to
get an idea of the ailments of these poor people.
And so our life flowed on in that desolate spot, by the banks of
the Great Colorado.
I rarely went outside the enclosure, except for my bath in the
river at daylight, or for some urgent matter. The one street
along the river was hot and sandy and neglected. One had not only
to wade through the sand, but to step over the dried heads or
horns or bones of animals left there to whiten where they died,
or thrown out, possibly, when some one killed a sheep or beef.
Nothing decayed there, but dried and baked hard in that
wonderful air and sun.
Then, the groups of Indians, squaws and halfbreeds loafing around
the village and the store! One never felt sure what one was to
meet, and although by this time I tolerated about everything that
I had been taught to think wicked or immoral, still, in
Ehrenberg, the limit was reached, in the sights I saw on the
village streets, too bold and too rude to be described in these
pages.
The few white men there led respectable lives enough for that
country. The standard was not high, and when I thought of the
dreary years they had already spent there without their families,
and the years they must look forward to remaining there, I was
willing to reserve my judgement.
CHAPTER XXI
WINTER IN EHRENBERG
We asked my sister, Mrs. Penniman, to come out and spend the
winter with us, and to bring her son, who was in most delicate
health. It was said that the climate of Ehrenberg would have a
magical effect upon all diseases of the lungs or throat.
