"It is the woman from Mohawk Station."
The captain assisted me out of the ambulance, and we walked toward the house together. The front room of the flat adobe building was bar-room, store, office, parlor; the back room was kitchen, dining-room, bed-room; and here we found "the woman of Mohawk Station." I entered the back room, at the polite invitation of the station-keeper, with whom the captain fell into conversation in the store or bar-room.
The woman was young—not over twenty-five—and had been on the way from Texas to California, with her husband and an ox-team, when Mr. Hendricks, the man who kept the forage-station at Mohawk, found them camped near the house one day, and induced them to stop with him. The woman took charge of the household, and the man worked at cutting firewood on the Gila and hauling it up to the house with the station-keeper's two horses, or at any other job which Mr. Hendricks might require of him. She had been a healthy, hearty woman when they left Texas; but laboring through the hot, sandy deserts, suffering often for water and sometimes for food, had considerably "shaken her," and she was glad and willing to stop here, where both she and her husband could earn money, and they wanted for neither water nor food—such as it is in Arizona. It was hard to believe she had ever been a robust, fearless woman, as she sat there cowering and shivering, and looking up at me with eyes that seemed ready to start from their sockets with terror.
"May I come in?" I asked, uncertain whether to venture closer to the shrinking form.
"Yes, yes," she said, breathing hard, and speaking very slowly. "Come in. It'll do me good. You're the first woman I've seen since—since—"
"Tell me all about it," I said, sitting down on the edge of the bed, as familiarly as though I had been her intimate friend for years; "or will it agitate you and make you sick?"
"No," she made answer; "I am dying now, and I have often and often wished I could see some woman and tell her the whole story before I die. It almost chokes me sometimes because I can't speak about it; and yet I always, always, think about it. I haven't seen any one but my husband and the station-keeper these last three weeks—there is so little travel now.
"You see, one Saturday afternoon there were two Mexicans came up this way from Sonora, and stopped at Mohawk Station to camp for the night. It was a cold, rainy, blustering day, and the men tried to build their fire against the wall of the house. It was the only way they could shelter themselves from the wind and rain, as Mr. Hendricks would not allow them to come into the house. Pretty soon Mr. Hendricks drove them off, though they pleaded hard to stay; and Colonel B., who had arrived in the meantime, on his way to Tucson, told Mr. Hendricks that, if he knew anything about Mexicans, those two would come back to take revenge. Perhaps Mr. Hendricks himself was afraid of it, as he picketed his two horses out between the colonel's tent and the house, for fear the Mexicans might come in the night to drive them off. But they did not return till Sunday afternoon, when, after considerable wrangling, Mr. Hendricks engaged them both to work for him. The colonel had pulled up stakes and had gone on his way to Tucson Sunday morning, so that we were alone with the Mexicans during the night. But they behaved themselves like sober, steady men; and the next morning they and my husband went down to the river, some three miles away, to cut wood, which they were to haul up with the team later in the day. Have you been at Mohawk Station, and do you know how the house is built?" she asked, interrupting herself.