The stout-hearted and confiding girl allowed the second trial, and between the steamboat agent, the Lieutenant, and the red wine, the aching molar was finally extracted.
This was a serious and painful occurrence. It did not cause any of us to laugh, at the time. I am sure that Ellen, at least, never saw the comical side of it.
When it was all over, I thanked Fisher, and Jack beamed upon me with: "You see, Mattie, my case of instruments did come in handy, after all."
Encouraged by success, he applied for a pannier of medicines, and the Ehrenberg citizens soon regarded him as a healer. At a certain hour in the morning, the sick ones came to his office, and he dispensed simple drugs to them and was enabled to do much good. He seemed to have a sort of intuitive knowledge about medicines and performed some miraculous cures, but acquired little or no facility in the use of the language.
I was often called in as interpreter, and with the help of the sign language, and the little I knew of Spanish, we managed to get an idea of the ailments of these poor people.
And so our life flowed on in that desolate spot, by the banks of the Great Colorado.
I rarely went outside the enclosure, except for my bath in the river at daylight, or for some urgent matter. The one street along the river was hot and sandy and neglected. One had not only to wade through the sand, but to step over the dried heads or horns or bones of animals left there to whiten where they died, or thrown out, possibly, when some one killed a sheep or beef. Nothing decayed there, but dried and baked hard in that wonderful air and sun.
Then, the groups of Indians, squaws and halfbreeds loafing around the village and the store! One never felt sure what one was to meet, and although by this time I tolerated about everything that I had been taught to think wicked or immoral, still, in Ehrenberg, the limit was reached, in the sights I saw on the village streets, too bold and too rude to be described in these pages.
The few white men there led respectable lives enough for that country. The standard was not high, and when I thought of the dreary years they had already spent there without their families, and the years they must look forward to remaining there, I was willing to reserve my judgement.