The burros plainly shared the feeling of relief in reaching a more passable region, and the art of burro-punching began, consequently, to disclose its difficulties. From one side and then the other of the trail they would break away in all directions, exploring the surrounding country, never with an air of mischief, but always with a sober, dogged perversity that was the more exasperating because it wore a mask of reason. Once back into the trail, they might keep it faultlessly for miles on end, and then, from no apparent cause, begin once more to wander. They were most difficult to manage at the fords. Generally they scattered to the four winds at the first approach to water, and when we had corralled them again and forced them down to the brink, they would stand calmly, planted ankle-deep in the stream, resolutely determined not to move. It was then that Price gave vent to real profanity, and I am bound to own that it was effective. When beating and prodding and the milder invective failed to urge the burros forward, Price would stand back, pale with rage, and begin to swear, calling upon all his gods and blasting the reputations of his beasts unto the third and fourth generation of their ancestors. By some subtle perception they seemed to understand that this meant business, and slowly at first, but presently, as though they rather enjoyed the water, they waded through and started down the trail beyond.
We camped that night in a narrow cañon whose level bed was well grown with trees and walled by scarped cliffs, which rose sheer above it. Price said that it formed a miniature Yosemite, and certainly it made good camping-ground; for with plenty of wood and water, it was well protected from the wind, and we slept there in great comfort. But our fare was growing monotonous. We soon exhausted the supply of beef and had since been living upon bacon and bread, so that we heartily welcomed the sight of a ranchman’s cabin near the end of the next day’s march, for there we purchased a peck of potatoes and thus enlarged our bill of fare to bacon and “spuds” and bread and gravy.
Thanksgiving-day was celebrated by faring sumptuously in the evening and sleeping under cover. And it was the more delightful celebration for being wholly unpremeditated. There was no prospect through the day of anything but the usual march and camp in the open at night. We were plainly in a more populous region, for we had struck a wagon trail again, and repeatedly, in the morning, we met farm wagons laden with solemn families in Sunday dress. As the afternoon wore on we grew hungrier for thinking of Thanksgiving dinners. At dusk we were passing a ranch upon which the hay presses had just ceased working for the day. A little farther down the road we overtook two men who were about to enter a wooden building, which proved to be a deserted school-house. Price hailed them and they turned, standing in the open door. Practised as he was in the amenities of the frontier, it took him no time to strike up an acquaintance, and soon we were bade welcome to share the school-house as a camping-place.
Our hosts were a young American frontiersman and his “partner,” an Indian, who together had a contract for pressing hay on the neighboring ranch, and who were living meanwhile in this deserted building. Having admitted us, they completed their welcome by doing everything in their power for our comfort. They arranged with the owner to pasture our animals on the ranch for the night, and showed us where to find wood for a fire and where on the floor to spread our bed. And when the evening meal was ready, they proposed that we should club together, giving us of their fresh meat and roasted Indian corn and steaming hot bread in exchange for our “spuds” and bacon. But we had some chance of making return, for they had no tobacco to compare with ours, and far into the night we sat talking, over pipes fragrant of good weed.
Price and I were making progress in acquaintance, and every day I had fresh cause for self-congratulation at my extraordinary luck in having fallen in with so good a guide. Of excellent Irish family, Price was not without education and a taste for letters, although he had chosen, almost as a boy, the career of an adventurer on the frontier. And now at middle life, having ranged the Southwest as few men have done, and having seen all phases of its life and shared most of them, he was looking forward to further casual living, perfectly content so long as he had a camping outfit and could wander as he pleased over the face of nature. That some day he would “strike it rich” he never doubted—and may his faith come true. Meanwhile he was getting a good deal out of life. Nature in her milder moods was a constant solace and a joy to him. In long marches through golden Indian summer days, he sang and spouted verses of his own, and told me veritable Ulysses’s tales of men and their strange ways. The few books which he had read he had made his own, for his memory was retentive, and he never forgot, apparently, a face or a name, so that his progress through the country was like a walk about his own neighborhood.
With the instinctive, gentlemanlike reserve of the Western frontiersman, he never questioned me about myself; he was far more interested in what knowledge I might have gathered, which he could add to his own. Oddly enough, it was the little reading that I had done in philosophy that seemed to attract him most. Many a night when it was mild enough to sleep with our heads uncovered we lay side by side, “overarched by gorgeous night,” gazing into the starry firmament, and I would tell him what I could of theories of the universe from Thales to Herbert Spencer, feeling all the while the tension of his mind as he reached out eagerly for these guesses at the mystery of things.
It happened that I had been reading “Coningsby,” at Creede, and Prince slipped the copy into his pocket as we left the camp. He devoured it by our camp-fires at night. The story held him, but most of all he was spellbound by its literary charm, and he added a quaint reason for his liking in the remark:
“You know,” he said to me, “Lord Beaconsfield was always square with the Irish.”
His national partisanship was of the stanchest, and he had always given to the Irish fund when he could; but the outcome of the fight in Committee Boom No. 15 had been too much for him, and he would stoutly maintain that never again, so long as the “traitors” who had turned against Parnell were in the ascendant, would he interest himself in furthering Home Rule—threads of vital connection which were a little strange, I thought, between points so widely severed as St. Stephen’s and the deserts of Arizona.
Elsewhere I have already sketched in outline our trip as we walked south together from Durango to the San Juan, then through the Navajo Reservation to the high plateau of northern New Mexico, where, utterly deserted by fair weather, we camped for a week, while a cold wave swept over us, forcing the thermometer down to ten and twelve degrees below zero, and nearly freezing us and our animals in the still cold of the winter nights.