I was willing enough to rest outside, knowing that we had reached a hospitable roof and that a dinner was assured. Sitting there for some time, I presently began to question what was keeping Price, when the cabin-door opened and two women appeared. As they walked down the footpath to the gate, I gathered that they were neighbors returning from a Christmas call. But this was the least interesting inference, and I was totally at a loss for others. The wonder grew as they came nearer. They were young and faultlessly dressed, and one of them was beautiful. Their dress was of the kind that charms with its perfect simplicity and the air of natural distinction with which it is worn. They rested frank eyes on me for a moment as they passed and nodded pleasantly, speaking their thanks with sweet voices, as I stood holding open the gate. Who they were remained a mystery, and I was content to have it so, for they left me not without a sense of Christmas visitation, which stirred again the memories of my own “God’s country.”
The ranchman was a Virginian, tall, fair-eyed, and soft of speech, and when he and Price came out together they were stanch friends on the strength of an earlier acquaintance, and we had the freedom of the ranch. We unpacked and corralled the animals and then made ready for dinner. Not for two days had we tasted food, and now we were seated with our host and hostess and their two sons at a table which groaned under sweet potatoes and roast corn and piles of bread and great dishes full of steaming “hog and hominy,” and with it all, the best of Christmas cheer. For two days we stayed at the Virginian’s ranch and then, having purchased from him a fresh store of food, we resumed the march by way of the Tonto Basin and Fort McDowell to Phœnix.
On New-year’s-day we were camped at Fort McDowell; and, when we set out early on the next morning, there remained but about thirty miles to Phœnix, so we resolved to cover it in a single march. Night found us still some miles from the city, but the night was clear and flooded with moonlight. The moon made plain the way, yet played fantastically over the face of the country. Long reaches of white sand were converted into Arabian deserts, with pilgrim caravans moving across them; the irrigated ranches were transformed into tropical gardens, whose luxuriance was heightened by the exquisite softness of the night, and then there were stretches of uncompromising Arizona desert, dusty and cactus-grown and redolent of alkali.
It was nearing midnight when we entered the town. Price directed the way to a corral where he was known, and where we left the animals feasting on fresh alfalfa, while we fared forth to see his friends. It was precisely as though Price had invited me around to his club. He led the way to a saloon, and as we entered it, I saw at once its typical character. At the left of the entrance was a bar, gorgeous with mirrors and cut glass, while down the deep recesses of the room were faro and roulette tables and tables for poker. The groups about them were formed of “cow-punchers,” and prospectors and “Greasers” and Chinamen, and even Indians, all mingling and intermingling with a freedom that suggested that in gambling there is a touch of nature that makes the whole world kin.
But more immediately interesting to us was a group which stood beside the bar. It was made up, as I found, of politicians, high in territorial office, all of whom knew Price and hailed him cordially while asking after his luck. For some time we stood talking with them, then one of their number, himself not a politician but a business man, proposed our joining him at supper. We accepted, I the more delightedly because he, of all the group, had most attracted me. Tall and very handsome, he had the bearing of a gentleman, and what he told me of himself confirmed my own impression of a richly varied past. Far into the night we talked, and I could well believe him when he said that the fascination of the life which he had led on the frontier had so far grown upon him that, while he was glad to go back at times to his former home in New York, he could no longer remain contented there, hearing as he always did after a few months, at most, the call back to the wild freedom of the plains. It was under the spell of what he said, enforced by my little experience as a “burro-puncher,” that I went to sleep that night on a bed of alfalfa in the corral; and when I wakened in the morning and found letters urging my return to the East, I was conscious of an indifference to the idea which was wholly new to my experience.
INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS
INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS
If anything is wanting to darken the picture of life in city slums, it is a sense of the needlessness of much of the suffering. And this is the sense which I cannot escape in looking back upon a winter in Chicago, from the vantage point of nearly a year of walking and working through regions west of that city. I left Chicago in May of 1892, and entered San Francisco in February of the following year, having gone on foot, in the meantime, through Illinois and southern Minnesota and western Iowa, and almost from end to end of Nebraska and Colorado and through some of New Mexico and much of Arizona and California. It was not in the character of a tramp, but as a wage-earner, that I made the journey; and the only notable fact about it was that I not only never lacked for labor, but I almost never had to ask for it, having scores of opportunities of work pressed upon me by employers hard up for hands. I am well aware of the abnormal in my experiment and of its little worth apart from the value of experience to myself, and I know how slight a connection with the deeper causes which give rise to congestion in labor centres the fact of ready employment in the country may have. Yet, as one result of personal contact, I cannot help seeing much of the misery of the mass in the light of individuals suffering wretchedly for want of knowledge of a better chance.