Digging Ye First Corral Ditch.
Later it turned out that A was on some government work and had seventeen soldiers camped outside; they had stayed at an Estancia the night before where he had lost money at monte probably, probably had a "wet" night.
He was not in an amiable frame of mind. When he went to bed, he asked B if he would come and kill him as he slept; also if B would lock up his papers and things.
B told him to go to bed; that (B) was English. But why is B alive? and perhaps A?
[FIRE!]
Five small wooden huts originally brought from England and later hauled forty miles or more across a camp on bullock-wagons to start a new colony next to Indian territory. Each hut is about eight feet square and they are a foot apart with the high grass cut off around about in case of prairie fires. Three men from one end hut have gone shooting deer or emus or whatever turns up, leaving a heap of powder-flasks, guns, saddles, and clothes in one corner of their shanty; blankets, etc., hanging out of the lower bunk, half-cover and open box on the floor with eight pounds of loose powder in it. The next hut is empty except when the owner comes to lie down, gasp, and perspire. It is so hot that you can break a piece of grass, and he is digging, with scarcely any clothes on, the first big corral ditch. Once as he lies half stupidly, listening lazily to a crackling, thinking that if he had sense enough he would wonder what it could be. Then he gets up to see. Fire had started in some way in the heap of clothes and was running up the thin boards to the roof. There is not much room but there is a fork with which he begins to shovel out the burning heap, and yell for water, which his brother, asleep in a further hut, brings when he realizes what is wanted. This water was thrown into the box of powder, but all this time the sparks have been falling into it and the man wants to know why everything was not blown to kingdom come before that water came.
