The trail led us then through a dreary desert, where at times it was with great difficulty that we got fodder for our burros and wood enough to cook our meals and water enough to drink. After days of such marching and camping, there was immense delight in coming eventually to some cedar grove, where living water flowed and grass grew thick and we could build a huge campfire at night of well-seasoned cedar boughs.
The only sign of habitation that we saw for days together was an occasional trader’s post, about which we usually found a considerable company of Navajos. Price could speak their language, and the young braves occasionally passed us on the march. Now and then one joined us in camp, shared a meal with us, and, after a long talk with Price, rolled himself in his blanket and slept beside our fire.
PRICE COULD SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE, AND NOW AND THEN ONE JOINED US IN CAMP.
At last we came out upon the Santa Fé Railway, not far from Fort Wingate, and followed the line to Gallup, where, in a grove on the hill above the village, we went into camp for the night. As a matter of fact we remained there nearly a week. Quite buried under a soft, wet snow we awoke on the first morning to find ourselves lying in melting slush, and the trail so obstructed that we could not get on. Then a bitter cold set in, and, in a region where I imagined the whole winter like a balmy spring, the thermometer sank to ten and twelve degrees below zero every night until we had nearly perished from the cold.
But the wave passed over us at last, and on December 10th we set out again, really none the worse for the touch of Arctic weather. Following the line of the Santa Fé Railway we crossed into Arizona, and, from a point due north of it, we cut down to the Petrified Forest and on down to a Mormon settlement called Woodruff on the Little Colorado River. It was two days’ march thence to another Mormon settlement, Heber by name, among the Mogollon Mountains.
All this time Indian summer had utterly failed us, and had been succeeded by a season of lowering days wherein light snow-falls were frequent. Price hated snow as he hated nothing else in nature. It got upon his nerves and drove him to a species of madness. Frequently in the course of the journey from Gallup to Heber snow fell at night. Price was usually the first to stir in the morning. We had knowledge of a snow-fall in the added weight upon us when we woke, and it was something memorable to see Price throw back the blankets and the heavy tarpaulin which were drawn over our heads, and lift himself on his elbow in the gray dawn, and gaze about with fierce anger in his black eyes upon a pure, white, flawless world, with soft snow clinging to every twig in the still morning air, and delicate crystal prisms beginning to form in the warmth of the coming sun, and hear him growl, in deep disgust,
“This is hell!”
But Heber marked nearly the last stage of that phase of our journey. We spent Sunday, the 18th December, there with an old Mormon elder and his son; worked for them on Monday for our keep and then renewed the march on Tuesday morning. It was a long, hard day’s pull up the northern side of the mountain to the “rimrock,” in deep snow through a vast primeval forest of spruce and pine. Then a wonderful thing happened, for we made a sharp descent on the south side and, in the space of a little more than a day, reached a country where there was no snow, and the sun shone warm, and the cotton-wood was in full bloom along the water-courses, and the cedar and live-oak stood green against the winter brown of the grass-grown hills.
We had Indian summer once more, and the softest, balmiest Indian summer has accompanied us thence all the way to Phœnix. We had hardships to endure, for the way was long and our provisions sometimes ran out. Once we lost our way for a time in a maze of “box cañons” and had nothing to eat for twenty-four hours, until, late on Christmas afternoon, we came out upon the ranch of a Virginian settler, whom Price knew well, and whose wife gave us a royal dinner of “hog and hominy,” which I have heard lightly spoken of as a dish, but which I shall always remember as a most satisfying delicacy.