Once more into the valley, and into Globe as the lights came out. Globe runs up-hill at the base of a huge, dark mountain, full of gold and copper and other precious metals. Cowboys and bright-robed Apaches still walk the streets. We knew the town was busy and prosperous, but as usual the Arizonans had forgotten to mention its scenic value, which any hotel proprietor back home would have envied. The air, too, blows bracing and keen, and the town’s whole atmosphere is brisk,—except at the drug-store, where I dropped in to shop for a cake of soap, and spent an hour,—a delicious, gossipy hour. The druggist evidently had a weakness for high-priced soaps which he had indulged lavishly in the seclusion of Globe, more for esthetic pleasure than hope of commercial gain. We were kindred souls, for Toby and I had developed a mania for soap-collecting, and at each new hotel pilfered soap with joy. We discussed the relative merits of French and domestic soaps, of violet and sandalwood, of scented and unscented. He told me the kind his wife used, and as an indirect compliment I bought a cake of it.
And so, to bed, and to dream I had driven the car to the third floor of our hotel, when the proprietor discovered it, and ordered me to take it away. They refused us the elevator and I was forced to bump the great leviathan downstairs, one step at a time. How I labored to keep the unwieldy bulk from getting beyond control! I awoke to find both feet pressed hard against the footboard of the bed.
At the garage next morning we heard more of the dangers of the Apache Trail. Considering nobody had thought the dangers of the Winkleman road important enough to mention, I became extremely dubious that we would reach Roosevelt Dam alive. Still, the weather was charming, blue sky and hot sun. I could not believe the Lord would let anyone die on such a day.
As if the sun were not bright enough, fields of golden stubble made the scene dance with light. A herd of Holsteins lent a dash of black and white, and the far hills across the Gila were pink, mauve, orange, lemon,—any preposterous color but those a normal hill should be.
We were following the trail over which Coronado and his army rode when, incidentally to their search for gold, they made history in 1540. Over this same road, for thousands of years, native Americans, Toltecs, cliff-dwellers, Apaches, friars, and forty-niners, have traveled to satisfy blood-lust and gold-lust, religion, fanaticism, and empire building. Until the Roosevelt Dam let in a flood of tourists, few traveled it except on grim business. The romance of a thousand years of tense emotions experienced by resolute men haunts that lovely sun-flooded valley.
Mormons still follow the Trail, recognizable by their long, greasy beards. One such passed us, driving an ancient Ford,—the very one, I should say, in which Brigham Young came to Utah. It showed faded remnants of three coats of paint, white, blue and black. On the radiator rested a hen coop containing several placid biddies. We tacitly ignored a murmur from Toby about “an eggs-hilarating drive.” A dozen children, more or less, sat beside the Mormon. Attached to the Ford was a wagon, drawn by six burros, with a burro colt trotting beside, and atop the wagon, under a canvas roof, a few more women and children. We were too appalled to notice whether the Ford pulled the burros, or the burros pushed the Ford. Following the prairie schooner came a rickety wagon, piled with chairs, stoves and other domestic articles. Last of all came a house. It was, to be sure, a small house, but considering that the car was only working on two cylinders, one could not reasonably expect more.
Later we passed a man on horseback, wearing two sombreros, one atop the other, with a certain jaunty defiance. Whether he did it from ostentation, for warmth, to save space, to keep out moths, or was just moving, we could not guess. Or he may have been a half-crazy prospector, whose type we began to recognize,—old, vague-eyed men with strange beards, speech curiously halting, from long disuse, and slow, timid manners,—riding a burro or rack-of-bones horse up a side trail. In every section of the Rockies one meets these ancient, unwashed optimists, searching in unlikely crannies, more from life-long habit than in the hope of striking it rich. So long have they lived remote from human beings, that if a gold mine suddenly yielded them the long sought fortune and compelled them to return to the world, they would die of homesickness.
When Coronado marched over the Apache Trail, he saw far above him a walled town built in the recessed cliffs, whose protective coloring made it nearly invisible to the casual passerby. The Spaniard, seeking the Seven Cities of Cibola, imagined he had discovered one of their strongholds, but when he rushed up the steep path, more breathless, doubtless in his heavy armor than we four centuries later in our khaki suits, he found the swallow’s nest deserted, and the birds flown,—where and for what reason is the great mystery of the Southwest.
So cunningly hidden are these sky parlors that we drove by them without seeing them, and had to inquire their whereabouts at the local postoffice. At Monte Cristo they show you the very window from which the Count did not leap; at Salem any citizen will proudly stop work to point out the hill where the witches were not burned, but the postmistress in a Georgette waist knew of the cliff-dwellings only as a fad of crazy tourists, although she could have walked to them in the time she took to remove her chewing gum before answering us. Out West they have not learned the art of making their ancestors earn an honest penny.
We lunched at the Tonto ruins, and that lunch marks the beginning of Toby’s mania for hoarding bits of broken pottery, charred sticks and other relics of the past. She learned to distinguish between the red and black of the middle ages, the black and white of an earlier era, and the plain thumb-nail of remotest antiquity. She never could resist adding just one more bit of painted clay or obsidian to her knobby collection, and the blue bandana in which she tied them grew steadily larger, until it overflowed into the pockets of the car, and the food box, and after awhile she clinked as she walked, and said “Ouch” when she sat down absent-mindedly.