“Are you a—a—” Embarrassment took me as it would were I to check myself on the verge of asking a courteously disposed stranger if he had ever embezzled.
“Oh, I’m no Mormon,” my new friend said, with a chuckle, and I was glad to hear him come down to reasonable English. “But Gentiles are in the minority in this valley.”
“I didn’t know we’d got to the valleys yet,” said I, eagerly, connecting Mormons with fertility and jasmine. And I lifted the flaps of the stage, first one side and then the other, and saw the desert everywhere flat, treeless, and staring like an eye without a lid.
“This is the San Simon Valley we’ve been in all the time,” he replied. “It goes from Mexico to the Gila, about a hundred and fifty miles.”
“Like this?”
“South it’s rockier. Better put the flap down.”
“I don’t see where people live,” I said, as two smoky spouts of sand jetted from the tires and strewed over our shoes and pervaded our nostrils. “There’s nothing—yes, there’s one bush coming.” I fastened the flaps.
“That’s Seven-Mile Mesquite. They held up the stage at this point last October. But they made a mistake in the day. The money had gone down the afternoon before, and they only got about a hundred.”
“I suppose it was Mormons who robbed the stage?”
“Don’t talk quite so loud,” the stranger said, laughing. “The driver’s one of them.”