I remember having been snowed-in, on a time, back in the farthest Arizona hills, with a Government physician recently from the East. He had sought Arizona to stimulate a lagging constitution that threatened to initiate him as one of the Club. He had traveled westward, visioning the tropic palms, the date trees, the pomegranate [[33]]hedges of Phœnix; and there we were at an altitude of 7000 feet above sea-level, with the snow two feet deep, and a frigid blast coming straight off the range. He had been lost that night and nearly frozen on the desert where the roads were obliterated, and only the sense of his team had brought him to this haven. We tore the harness from them first, and an engineer helped me to warm him into amiability after the horses were cared for. The time came for retiring, and I recall his diving between dank sheets in an unheated room at this little hill station, his teeth chattering, his lips blue, and the fervid expression of him:—
“Blank! And blankety-double-blank the damned Philadelphia fool who told me Arizona was warm!”
And as I surveyed that tempting array of victuals, I had the same feeling toward those kindly disposed men of Washington who, out of a crass ignorance, had assured me that their desert stations possessed food.
Later, a couple of obliging employees carried my trunk upstairs to a room that would have been a credit to a penitentiary. It welcomed one with four walls and possessed a window. There were also a ceiling and a floor. These necessary ornaments, together with a bed and a decrepit chair, which had crashed under many disconsolate employees and had been skillfully and maliciously fitted together again to lure me, comprised the generous list of fittings. All and several extras thought to be necessary to comfort could be supplied by the employee from his salary, the proportions of which had been established during the administration of Carl Schurz, and have changed but little since, despite wars and rumors of wars and the coming of the income tax, “which includes the quarters as part of the compensation.” [[34]]
Next morning I was aroused about dawn, or a little before, by the business of breaking stove-wood, a bombardment of mishandled crockery, and the hiss of vicious cooking. A thick wave of reanimated mutton-grease fogged upward and invaded my boudoir, which I sought to vacate as quickly as possible. I encountered the cook at the foot of the stairs, and she had not improved during the night.
“Good morning,” I tried to say cheerfully, which caused her to notice me. “Who cares for the rooms?” I asked. She bent on me a sinister eye, as if divining my thought.
“You mean, who cleans ‘em, an’ all that?”
“Just so,” I admitted.
“Well—you’ll care for your own.”
And that was that. It was final, with the wall-eyed finality that had become unwritten law in all properly conducted Agencies.