“I want to see what kind of blackbirds these are,” I explained to the man of the house, who came out of the door at that moment.
“Oh, they’re the same kind that is all over the universe,” he answered, smiling.
But his generalization was hasty, as generalizations are apt to be. They were Brewer’s blackbirds—the handsomest of grackles; birds that I had seen for the first time, at Del Rio, only the week before. I did not stay to admire their iridescence, but declining an invitation to ride (it was too cold for that, though the man was just going to harness up, he said), I buttoned another button and hastened on. The two or three persons I met each had something to say about the weather, but nobody stopped for prolonged comment. Short speeches and quick steps, or another crack at the mule, were the order of the day. Even at the South a man will generally hurry a little rather than freeze to death.
Well, the experience was more amusing than uncomfortable, after all, and I reached the hotel door just as rain began falling. Before night snow was mingled with the rain, and the next morning I saw a small boy, his eyes dancing with brightness, making a tiny snow image to stand upon the front-yard fence, while the mountains—that fairly surround the city, as they do the Holy City in the Hebrew psalm—were dazzling white. The mud was beyond belief, the walking laborious; but as I paused now and then for breath or to recover my footing, and saw all that glory about me, I thanked my stars that I was here. I was glad to see that even in this arid zone (arida zona, as the Mexicans are supposed to have begun by calling it) it still knew how both to rain and to snow.
“Well, now, this was a surprise, wasn’t it?” I remarked to a German whom I met in the valley road.
“You bet,” he answered; and then, with a smile, he added: “but it won’t last only a couple of days; that’s all.”
His mastery of American idiom recalls what another German farmer said on the same forenoon. He had been living here and in California since ’82, he told me.
“Which place do you like best?” I inquired.
“Oh, Arizona,” he answered, without hesitation. “Things are freer here,” he went on. “In Los Angeles, now, you have to dress up once in a while; but here, if you dress up, or if you don’t dress up, it don’t cut no ice.”
My first man’s confident “couple of days” was a trifle too confident. Twice two days have passed. In that time we have had summer weather (at noon), a pretty hard freeze (at night), and another rain and another snowfall, both heavier than the first.