University of Virginia Library

9. CHAPTER IX

Mrs. Reed, muffled to shapelessness in her waterproof
and two Army overcoats, asked, with just the trace of a quaver in
her tone, “How much farther is it now, do you suppose?”

“It can't be far,” her husband answered cheerfully,
straining his eyes into the moonless night for the glimmer of light
that would mark their over-night stop. She was holding his hand
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tightly under the robe, and he gave hers an encouraging squeeze.

The doherty wagon, a primitive ancestor of the station wagon,
with seats that could be converted into beds at night and canvas
sides that rolled down, lurched and bounced behind its four-mule
team, which felt their way at a gingerly walk over the rutted, stony
road. The driver, constrained by the presence of a lady, did not
swear aloud. Silently, however, with hair-raising oaths, he cursed
the mules, the darkness, the frightful road, the missing station, and
the day he joined the Army. Having left San Diego, where Reed had
gone to meet his wife, at two in the afternoon of November 15th, 1876,
the party expected to pass the first night at Jamul (pronounced, Mrs.
Reed learned with interest, Ha-mool), a tiny roadside station seven-
teen miles inland, but the road had turned out to be so rough that
any progress faster than a walk had threatened to shake both the am-
bulance (as the doherty wagon was also called) and its occupants
apartl. They had passed their baggage wagon, which was making even
worse headway, some miles back. The sun had gone down about five;
by seven it had become cold and they had begun to worry about missing
the station in the dark, and by nine, as they still lumbered hesi-
tantly through the almost tangible blackness, even Reed's cheerful-
ness had worn a little thin.

Holding his wife's hand and bracing her against the shat-
tering jolts of the wagon, he peered intently ahead.

"There! “There!” he exclaimed suddenly, relief escaping into
his voice. “That must be it.”

A light shone some distance ahead, a stationary, unblinking
light that must come from a house.

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“Oh, I am so glad! A fire, and something hot to drink!”

“Poor darling, you've had a dreadful time,” her husband
sympathized. “A train collision, a blizzard in Wyoming, and now this
awful ride. And all,” he added in a whisper, “for a worthless fellow
who adores you.” It was too dark to distinguish expressions, but
he knew she was smiling now.

The light gradually drew nearer. Misgivings sprang to
Reed's mind -surely it was on the wrong side of the road for the
Jamul station! Ordering the driver to stop as close to it as poss-
ible, he sent him in to inquire. In a few minutes he was back. It
was not the station.

“The man hopes the doctor and the lady will stay overnight
with him anyway,” he reported, addressing Reed in the third person
soldiers always used to officers. He added, “However, if the
doctor doesn't think the station is too far away....”

“Why?”

“He has no hay or grain for the mules, sir, and,” he con-
tinued, “he hasn't a bed, either. He says he and his old lady had
a little -‘family jar’ he called it -today, and she walked out
and took the bed and covers with her.”

Reed's laugh ended in a sigh. “Well, let's get on. He's
a very kind gentleman, I'm sure, but we'd better wait for a more
favorable time to accept his hospitality.”

The driver climbed aboard and shouted at the mules, and the
ambulance again bumped off behind its reluctant team. The road got
worse. The soldier sitting beside the driver had to get down sev-
eral times to see where it was. The driver was now earnestly curs-
ing not only the day he joined the Army but the day he was born.
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Ten o'clock passed. After an endless length of time, Reed again
looked at his watch. Only eleven. Emilie, uncomfortably dozing
against his shoulder, opened her eyes.

“What's that?” she demanded, as they rounded a bend.

It was a smoldering campfire, its dim glow just enough to
outline two wagons and two men wrapped in blankets sleeping beside
it. Reed, glad of the chance to stretch his legs, sprang out of
the ambulance. He shook one of the sleepers, a brawny, bearded
fellow, who sat up abruptly and reached for his rifle in the same
movement. Reed hastily stepped back so that the dim firelight
fell on his uniform and asked how far they were from the station.

“Two miles,” the teamster answered, his voice a sleepy
rumble, “over the worst road in California. Last mile,” he informed
them gloomily, “through a canyon a coyote can't hardly cross in
broad daylight.”

“Thanks, Sorry I had to disturb you.”

“That's all right,” the man growled, lying down again and
pulling his blankets around him. Reed heard him remark to his com-
panion who had awakened and raised up on one elbow, “Young Army
fellow wants to get to Jamul. He'll never get through that canyon
tonight.”

“Oh, won't I?” the young Army fellow said to himself grimly.
“Go ahead,” he told the driver. “Only two miles more.”

After another mile the road dipped into the mouth of the
canyon and lost itself completely in the jumble of boulders. The
tree covered walls rose up steeply on either side, multiplying the
darkness. The mules, unable to feel anything but stones under their
hooves, balked, while the driver cracked his whip over them in vain.

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Reed took a lantern, and the soldier a bit of candle,
and, getting out of the wagon, they clambered over the rocks to
the head of the team. Now stumbling and now sinking to their knees
in the soft sand, they kept just ahead of the mules and called di-
rections to the driver, who was by this time too preoccupied with
trying to get out of this boulder strewn waste without breaking an
axle to remember his grudge against Providence. Their slow, jolt-
ing progress, halted every few yards by a sizable boulder against
a wheel, made them feel that the preceding hours had been
passed on a race track. Emilie, clinging to the pitching, strain-
ing wagon, could see the flickering light up ahead, and kept calling
anxiously, “Where are you, Dr. Reed?” -she could never get used
to calling him anything else -“Please come back and let the sol-
dier carry the lantern!”

After an hour of calling directions, digging, shoving and
hoisting, the dreadful canyon was behind them. Ahead, again, was
a light. This time it was really the station. It was nothing but
a one room shack of plain board, about ten feet square, and a
stable, but never before had a human habitation looked so inviting
to the young doctor or his wife.

Reed aroused the station keeper, a frontiersman of for-
bidding appearance, who came out to the wagon with the officer.

“A lady!” he exclaimed, astounded, when he detected Emilie
shivering in the body of the ambulance. A few minutes before she
had been sure that nothing could ever make her smile again, not
at least until she had had something hot to drink and a good night's
rest, but his complete astonishment was so comic that a wavering
little smile came of itself to her face.

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“You must be right tired, ma'am,” he said, as he helped
her down, “but we'll have you comfortable in no time at all.”

When they entered the barren shack, with its dirt floor and
tiny window, which was really unnecessary since the wind poured un-
hindered through wide cracks between the boards, Emilie wondered
how he could ever make her or himself or anyone else comfortable
in it. It was furnished with a stool and a broken chair, an un-
painted pine table, a cooking stove and a bed which was nothing more
than a frame with a piece of canvas stretched over it. She sank
stiffly onto the stool.

Their host wasted no time. He started a roaring fire in
the stove, and made them some tea which he served in cracked cups
without saucers. Then he asserted with awkward gallantry that the
lady should have the bed -he would do all right with the mules -
and went to the stable for the night.

Dr. and Mrs. Reed agreed that the he was a dear man and
toasted him in scalding strong tea, and enthusiastically ate the
lunch they had carried along in the wagon. Both of them forgot
that they had been cold and tired and discouraged so short a time
before.

“I wouldn't have missed this for anything on earth,” Em-
ilie exclaimed.

Reed laughed. “Darling,” he said, “I hope you'll always
be able to say as much. You're in the Army now, you know.”

* * *

“This is the place, but that's not the man,” Reed observed
late the next day, as the wagon halted on the barren hillside. The
mules, blowing, hung their heads and let their long ears flop. The
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fading sunlight glinted coldly off the barrel of the Winchester
rifle that leaned against the wall of the hut. The tall man in
ragged pants and deerskin jacket slouching against the door
straightened and came toward them. He was plainly not Jackson,
the station keeper whom Reed had seen on his way to the coast.

“Howdy,” he drawled amiably to Reed. “Howdy, ma'am,”
to Mrs. Reed, touching his cap.

“Howdy,” Reed answered him. “Jackson here?”

“Was that the pore fellow's name?” the stranger inquired.
“No, he ain't here. He won't be here no more. He's dead.”

“Dead!” Reed exclaimed. “What happened to him? There
didn't seem to be anything the matter when I saw him on my way
through.”

“It wasn't nothing lingering,” the hunter said drily.
“I found him four-five days ago with a bullet through his head.
Coyotoes didn't leave nothing but bones, polished him clean. I
buried him up yonder,” he jerked him thumb vaguely over his shoul-
der. “I been camping in his cabin.”

Reed was shocked. “Haven't you any idea who killed him?”

“Some varmint. Indians, mebbe.” He dismissed the spec-
ulation with a shrug. Lonely frontiersmen were always getting
killed. It was one of the chances they took. “You all better
stop here. It's 'most sundown, and no place to stop farther on.
The lady can have the cabin. It ain't much, but it's shelter.”

They had little choice but to accept the invitation.

The frontiersman helped the soldiers put up the mules
and prepare the dinner. Emilie, suspecting him of having done
away with the cabin's previous occupant, followed his every move-
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ment with wide eyes. She was less impressed with his sinwey agil-
ity than with his possible wickedness. Would he, perhaps, dare
to sneak softly up on them in the night, and.... she shuddered,
unable to finish the thought. Her husband, guessing her uneasiness,
reassured her.

“I don't think he did it. He hasn't even protested his in-
nocence. He takes it for granted that we'll take it for granted.
Anyway, a murderer doesn't go around telling strangers that he's
found the body of his victim. If he hadn't told us, we'd never have
known that Jackson was killed.”

“Maybe,” Emilie agreed reluctantly, “but I don't like this
place. It gives me the creeps.”

After dinner their host indicated the rough bed under the
cabin's single window. “Guess you'll want to turn in early,” he
suggested, “I'll get the window open for you -it's mighty stiff.”

He gave it a vigorous jerk, and it screeched up. Reaching
behind the bed, he pulled out something with which to prop it open.
Reed could not smother an exclamation.

“Heavens, man! What have you got there?”

“This?” the frontiersman inquired with mild surprise.
“It's right handy to hold this here window up.”

It was the upper arm bone of the deceased Jackson.

* * *

The wagon road wound across the coastal range, dipped over
its crest and snaked down its eastern side. Far ahead, they could
sometimes glimpse stretches of the Arizona desert, threaded by the
trickle of the Gila River. The days were cool and pleasant in
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mid-November, the nights coolcold. Remembering the infantry captain
at Fort Yuma, Reed supposed that he was appearing at dinner more
formally attired during this season.

Following the stage road, the party crossed the Colorado
River a dozen miles below Yuma on a small barge, attached to a
rope stretched across the river, which was pulled along by a
couple of husky Indians. The road then followed the Gila River
for more than a hundred miles, before leaving it to strike off
into the desert toward Tucson. The region was still wild, and
trouble with the Indians common, but the frontier was yielding to
the penetration of ranchers and miners, and the country was opening
up to travel. The light, two-horse coaches of the Southern Over-
land Stage, which operated between El Paso and San Diego, became a
familiar sight to Emilie on the long trip.

The length of each day's march was determined principally
by the distance of water holes from each other. Travel by wagon
was slow; since the mules were not changed at frequent relays, as
stage horses were, they could not be driven too fast. It took Reed
and his party about three weeks to cover the five hundred miles
of mountain, valley and desert between San Diego and Tucson, where
Camp Lowell was situated. They arrived at the post the first week
in December, 1876, and Army life, as they were both to know it for
the next fourteen years, began for them.

It was a life distinguished principally by its narrowness.
The United States Army in the late 18790's and for many years there-
after was an organization of about twenty-five thousand men,
scattered in small groups all over the country. Existence, partic-
ularly at the distant western posts, was very monotonous. Pay for
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both officers and men was meagre; patriotism was its own reward,
in the opinion of the country that, confident it would never have
to fight another war, took little interest in the upkeep of its
fighting force. There were, in any case, few places to spend mon-
ey, since most of the western posts were planted miles from centers
of population offering any diversion but saloons.

The life was, by modern standards, a hard one. The officers'
quarters, built of unpainted board, adobe or logs, were small, ugly
and barren, and entirely innocent of such comforts as central heating,
running water and bathrooms. Water was usually hauled in wagons
from the nearest well or creek, and stored in barrels behind the
houses. The Commanding Officer usually had a fairly large dwell-
ing, but a lieutenant was lucky to get three of four rooms. En-
listed men lived in ill-ventilated, ill-heated barracks, often
with dirt floors, where it took enterprise and ingenuity to achieve
even minimum personal cleanliness.

Time was heavy on the hands of men and officers alike in
between the occasional Indian disturbances. The routine of inspec-
tion, drill, guard and other duties neither filled their time nor
taxed their energies. The soldiers got up baseball games, held
running, jumping and boxing matches and played poker. On their
days off they went hunting, or took aboard impressive amounts of
red-eye, or whatever the localnative intoxicant was called, and found
spectacular ways of disturbing the local peace.

The officers and their families did the best they could
with their meagre entertainment opportunites. The men hunted and
rode and fished, and the more intelligent among them developed
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hobbies that could be indulged locally, like geology or botany.
There were frequent picnics, dances, improvised theatricals -gay
entertainment, if repetitious. The women called on each other, had
tea parties, made over their dresses, eagerly attended the auctions
of the household goods of departing officers, and vied with each
other socially.

Tucson was unlike any town Mrs. Reed had known previouslybefore.
In one respect it did not even seem American. Spanish was the lan-
guage you most commonly heard spoken as you drove down its single
dusty street, or stepped over a dozing Papago Indian on you way
into the general store; the sprinkling of white Americans had adap-
ted themselves to the usage of the overwhelmingly Mexican population.
The San Diego-El Paso stage regularly rolled through the street,
raising a cloud of dust. An occasional prospector, plodding along
with his flop-eared donkey, passed through on his way to the moun-
tains on the eternal search for gold and silver. Otherwise there
was little travel. Buchalew Block, a row of one story adobe
houses, symbolized modern progress, and the number of saloons sug-
gested that it was a country to build a man's thirst. The sun baked
town, it seemed to Mrs. Reed, looked as though it had sprung up
out of the arid soil overnight, complete with basking population
and dusty main street. Nothing could have been less like the civ-
ilized, gracious South in which she had grown up, with its great
shade trees and softly weathered homes set in green lawns. But if
she missed home, she did not complain, and settled into the mono-
tonous life of the “Army wife” with the same kind of enthusiasm and
interest as Reed's.

Where there was so little variety, amusement tended to fall
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into a routine, but life was not without its unexpected humor. Reed
and his wife never forgot the post chaplain and his pet. He came
to call on them one evening, a diffident and serious man nearing
middle age, plainly excited and a little shaken. Greetings were
hardly over when his story came out: he had found a Gila monster,
the large, ugly, venomous lizard native to the arid part of Arizona,
in his kitchen. He had captured it in a potato sack.

“What are you going to do with the horrid thing?” Mrs.
Reed asked, shuddering.

“I am not quite sure. I wondered,” the minister speculated,
“if it might not respond to kindness. I believe that I shall try
to make a pet of it.”

Reed smiled. “You're a brave man, chaplain. They're ill-
natured things, and their bite's poisonous. I shouldn't advise
you to let it eat out of your hand.”

The chaplain nodded absently. He was already laying plans
to win the heart of his lizard.

He named it Sally Anne, for two officers' wives who were
his most faithful parishoners -the compliment was wasted on them
since neither cared greatly for Gila monsters -and spent a great
deal of time catching it insects for food. When the Reeds left
the post a few months later, the chaplain was still industriously
trying to rouse a spark of affection in its reptilian bosom.

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