“You bet!” answered the Native Daughter. “I s’pose you’re headed that way?”
“No,—” weakly,—“we thought we’d see Arizona first.”
“Well, girls, it’s lucky you met me. Now I can lay out a trip for you through California that will knock Arizona silly. There’s the Yosemite,—and the Big Trees,—and the climate,—grandest scenery in the world,—and San Francisco. After you reach Needles, you get good roads all the way,—nothing like these. My! To think you’d ’a wasted your time in Arizona if I hadn’t met you.”
“Yes, indeed. We can’t be grateful enough.”
The truth, with a little ingenuity, always serves. At this point we were luckily called to supper, cooked early for our convenience. We sat between Mr. Kelly, who leaped lightly from ships to sealing wax, from cabbages to kings in a jovial torrent of brogue, and the engineer of the mine. The latter was an Englishman well past middle age, with a slight cockney accent, apparently self-educated but with the thoroughness only his type achieves. When he spoke in a hesitating, deprecating way, vastly unlike Mr. Kelly’s self-assured flood, he exhibited a vast range of information, correct, unlike Mr. Kelly’s again, to the last detail. His vague brown eyes, the iris blue-rimmed, cleared and shone with faith when in a matter-of-course way he suddenly spoke of the “spirit world,” which it seems was very near to him. Fifty, painfully ugly, shabby middle-class, learned, and on telepathic terms with ghosts, he piqued curiosity, as a man who seemed to have much behind and little before him.
Kelly, on the other hand, was a man of futures, the longer and riskier the better. He was waiting a necessary month or two for the mine to yield him and its owners an immense fortune,—“and no stock to sell.” Arizona was “the greatest country in the world,” and this pocket of the hills the finest spot in Arizona. The “b’ys” who were expected to be entranced at our advent were the finest in the United States.
“All good b’ys,” he proclaimed while, eyes downcast, they shoveled huge knifefuls of beans to conceal their embarrassment, “good b’ys, and refined,—not what you usually get in mining camps. You won’t hear them speak a wor’rd before you not fit for ladies.”
He was right, there, for they opened not their mouths, except to fill them, while the boldest mumbled a “pass the butter!” Yet, without vanity, I think the company of “ladies” did give them a kind of agonized pleasure. When we left they watched us out of sight.
“An’ d’ye know what stopped the war?” continued Kelly, taking a jump we could not quite follow. “Ye thought Wilson did it, didn’t ye? He did not. It was copper. Copper did it. And Kelly. I saw how things was goin’—I wint to the Secret’ry of the Treasury, an’ I says to him, ‘McAdoo,’ I says, ‘Ye know as well as meself that this war has to stop. An’ why? Copper,’ I says,——”
The inside story of the armistice we never did learn, for an interruption came in the shape or shapelessness of the Native Daughter bearing a four layer cake, which we hardly finished before the gathering dark warned us to leave. We could barely withstand the pressure to stay overnight, to stay a week, or a month, or better,—“Come and settle. There’s land enough; ye can pick y’r spot, and I’ll have the b’ys put up a bungalow f’r ye. They’ll be tickled to death to do it.” As a sop to propriety he added, “Me old woman’s coming out next week.”