The next morning Bowen placed a tin can of water
under each point of contact; and as each cot had eight legs, and
the crib had four, twenty cans were necessary. He had not taken
the trouble to remove the labels, and the pictures of red
tomatoes glared at us in the hot sun through the day; they did
not look poetic, but our old enemies, the ants, were outwitted.
There was another species of tiny insect, however, which seemed
to drop from the little cotton-wood trees which grew at the edge
of the acequia, and myriads of them descended and crawled all
over us, so we had to have our beds moved still farther out on to
the open space of the parade ground.
And now we were fortified against all the venomous creeping
things and we looked forward to blissful nights of rest.
We did not look along the line, when we retired to our cots, but
if we had, we should have seen shadowy figures, laden with
pillows, flying from the houses to the cots or vice versa. It was
certainly a novel experience.
With but a sheet for a covering, there we lay, looking up at the
starry heavens. I watched the Great Bear go around, and other
constellations and seemed to come into close touch with Nature
and the mysterious night. But the melancholy solemnity of my
communings was much affected by the howling of the coyotes, which
seemed sometimes to be so near that I jumped to the side of the
crib, to see if my little boy was being carried off. The good
sweet slumber which I craved never came to me in those weird
Arizona nights under the stars.
At about midnight, a sort of dewy coolness would come down from
the sky, and we could then sleep a little; but the sun rose
incredibly early in that southern country, and by the crack of
dawn sheeted figures were to be seen darting back into the
quarters, to try for another nap. The nap rarely came to any of
us, for the heat of the houses never passed off, day or night, at
that season. After an early breakfast, the long day began again.
The question of what to eat came to be a serious one. We
experimented with all sorts of tinned foods, and tried to produce
some variety from them, but it was all rather tiresome. We almost
dreaded the visits of the Paymaster and the Inspector at that
season, as we never had anything in the house to give them.
One hot night, at about ten o'clock, we heard the rattle of
wheels, and an ambulance drew up at our door. Out jumped Colonel
Biddle, Inspector General, from Fort Whipple.
