LITMIR.BIZ

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up and out of the post in such quick time that I do not remember whether it was twelve hours or twenty-four. To be sure, we did not have an immense amount of plunder to pack. None the less did we work briskly to carry out orders and get away in the shortest time possible.

      We had to leave one of our men in the hospital; he had accidentally shot himself in the leg, and was now convalescing from the amputation. But the rest were in the saddle and out on the road through the Santa Catalina Cañon before you could say Jack Robinson.

      And not altogether without regret. There was a bright side to the old rookery, which shone all the more lustrously now that we were saying farewell.

      We had never felt lonesome by any means. There was always something going on, always something to do, always something to see.

      The sunrises were gorgeous to look upon at the hour for morning stables, when a golden and rosy flush bathed the purple peaks of the Pinaleño, and at eventide there were great banks of crimson and purple and golden clouds in the western horizon which no painter would have dared depict upon canvas.

      There were opportunities for learning something about mineralogy in the “wash” of the cañons, botany on the hill-sides, and insect life and reptile life everywhere. Spanish could be picked up from Mexican guides and packers, and much that was quaint and interesting in savage life learned from an observation of the manners of the captives—representatives of that race which the Americans have so frequently fought, so generally mismanaged, and so completely failed to understand.

      There was much rough work under the hardest of conditions, and the best school for learning how to care for men and animals in presence of a sleepless enemy, which no amount of “book l’arnin’” could supply.

      The distance from Old Camp Grant to Tucson, Arizona, over the wagon-road, was fifty-five measured miles. The first half of the journey, the first day’s march—as far as the Cañon del Oro—has already been described. From the gloomy walls of the shady cañon, in which tradition says gold was found in abundance in the earliest days of occupation by the Caucasians, the wagons rolled rapidly over the Eight-mile Mesa, over some slightly hilly and sandy country, until after passing the Riito, when Tucson came in sight and the road became firmer. All the way, on both sides of the road, and as far as eye could reach, we had in sight the stately mescal, loaded with lovely velvety flowers; the white-plumed Spanish bayonet, the sickly green palo verde, without a leaf; the cholla, the nopal, the mesquite, whose “beans” were rapidly ripening in the sultry sun, and the majestic “pitahaya,” or candelabrum cactus, whose ruby fruit had long since been raided upon and carried off by flocks of bright-winged humming-birds, than which no fairer or more alert can be seen this side of Brazil. The “pitahaya” attains a great height in the vicinity of Grant, Tucson, and MacDowell, and one which we measured by its shadow was not far from fifty-five to sixty feet above the ground.

      On this march the curious rider could see much to be remembered all the days of his life. Piles of loose stones heaped up by loving hands proclaimed where the Apaches had murdered their white enemies. The projection of a rude cross of mescal or Spanish bayonet stalks was evidence that the victim was a Mexican, and a son of Holy Mother Church. Its absence was no index of religious belief, but simply of the nationality being American.

      Of the weird, blood-chilling tales that were narrated as each of these was passed I shall insert only one. It was the story, briefly told, of two young men whose train had been attacked, whose comrades had been put to flight, and who stood their ground resolutely until the arrows and bullets of the foe had ended the struggle. When found, one of the bodies was pierced with sixteen wounds, the other with fourteen.

      On the left flank, or eastern side, the view was hemmed in for the whole distance by the lofty, pine-clad Sierra Santa Catalina; but to the north one could catch glimpses of the summit of the black Pinal; to the west there was a view over the low-lying Tortolita clear to the dim, azure outlines which, in the neighborhood of the Gila Bend, preserved in commemorative mesa-top the grim features of Montezuma, as Mexican myth fondly averred.

      A little this side was the site of the “Casa Grande,” the old pile of adobe, which has been quite as curious a ruin in the contemplation of the irrepressible Yankee of modern days as it was to Coronado and his followers when they approached it under the name of “Chichilticale” more than three centuries and a half ago.

      Still nearer was the “Picacho,” marking the line of the Great Southern Mail road; at its base the ranch of Charlie Shibell, where the stages changed teams and travellers stopped to take supper, the scene of as many encounters with the Apaches as any other spot in the whole Southwest. Follow along a little more to the left, and there comes the Santa Teresa Range, just back of Tucson, and credited by rumors as reliable as any ever brought by contraband during the war with being the repository of fabulous wealth in the precious metals; but no one has yet had the Aladdin’s lamp to rub and summon the obedient genii who would disclose the secret of its location.

      Far off to the south rises the glistening cone of the Baboquivari, the sacred mountain in the centre of the country of the gentle Papagoes, and on the east, as we get down nearer to the Riito, the more massive outlines of the Santa Rita peak overshadowing the town of Tucson, and the white, glaring roof of the beautiful mission ruin of San Xavier del Bac.

      Within this space marched the columns of the Coronado expedition, armed to the teeth in all the panoply of grim war, and bent on destruction and conquest; and here, too, plodded meek friar and learned priest, the sons of Francis or of Loyola, armed with the irresistible weapons of the Cross, the Rosary, and the Sacred Text, and likewise bent upon destruction and conquest—the destruction of idols and the conquest of souls.

      These were no ordinary mortals, whom the imagination may depict as droning over breviary or mumbling over beads. They were men who had, in several cases at least, been eminent in civil pursuits before the whispers of conscience bade them listen to the Divine command, “Give up all and follow Me.” Eusebio Kino was professor of mathematics in the University of Ingoldstadt, and had already made a reputation among the scholars of Europe, when he relinquished his titles and position to become a member of the order of Jesuits and seek a place in their missionary ranks on the wildest of frontiers, where he, with his companions, preached the word of God to tribes whose names even were unknown in the Court of Madrid.

      Of these men and their labors, if space allow, we may have something to learn a chapter or two farther on. Just now I find that all my powers of persuasion must be exerted to convince the readers who are still with me that the sand “wash” in which we are floundering is in truth a river, or rather a little river—the “Riito”—the largest confluent of the Santa Cruz. Could you only arrange to be with me, you unbelieving Thomases, when the deluging rains of the summer solstice rush madly down the rugged face of the Santa Catalina and swell this dry sand-bed to the dimensions of a young Missouri, all tales would be more easy for you to swallow.

      But here we are. That fringe of emerald green in the “bottom” is the barley land surrounding Tucson; those gently waving cottonwoods outline the shrivelled course of the Santa Cruz; those trees with the dark, waxy-green foliage are the pomegranates behind Juan Fernandez’s corral. There is the massive wall of the church of San Antonio now; we see streets and houses, singly or in clusters, buried in shade or unsheltered from the vertical glare of the most merciless of suns. Here are pigs staked out to wallow in congenial mire—that is one of the charming customs of the Spanish Southwest; and these—ah, yes, these are dogs, unchained and running amuck after the heels of the horses, another most charming custom of the country.

      Here are “burros” browsing upon tin cans—still another institution of the country—and here are the hens and chickens, and the houses of mud, of one story, flat, cheerless, and monotonous were it not for the crimson “rastras” of chile which, like mediaeval banners, are flung to the outer wall. And women, young and old, wrapped up in “rebosos” and “tapalos,” which conceal all the countenance but the left eye; and men enfolded in cheap poll-parrotty blankets of cotton, busy in leaning against the door-posts and holding up the weight of “sombreros,” as large in diameter as cart-wheels and surrounded by snakes of silver bullion weighing almost as much as the wearers.

      The

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