“It’s good to see women,” said the little engineer as he quietly shook hands. His vague eyes looked more haunted than ever. “It—it gets lonesome here.”
“Give my love to California,” screamed the cook, taking our destination for granted.
As we gave one last look at those hospitable miners, friendly as dogs who have been locked in an empty house, and a last look over the wonderful landscape rolling below us for miles, we too felt a pang at leaving.
“We’ll stop in on our way back,” we promised.
Toward dark, we began to encounter snow drifts. The first were easily passed, but as we climbed higher and the night thickened we found each drift a little harder to conquer, though the mild air was hardly tempered with frost.
Toby, a beginner at Galveston, could already manage almost any ordinary road, but not until later did she become experienced enough for sky-climbing. Consequently I took the canyons, and for two days there had been little else. By ten, when one of the neat state sign-posts told us we were but five miles from the Goodfellow Ranch, our destination, I felt nearly exhausted, nervously and physically. But the home stretch proved worst of all. It led across a prairie to a descent encouragingly marked “Private road. Dangerous. Take at your own risk.”
Well, to reach our bed that night we had to take it. In a moment we were nose-diving down another canyon, which in daylight was only moderately terrifying, but at night seemed bottomless. It was Fish Creek over again, with two irritating additions,—one, a slimy, skiddy adobe road full of holes and strewn with boulders; and two, a ridiculous baby jack-rabbit, who, frightened by our headlights, leaped just ahead of us in the ruts. He would neither hurry nor remove himself. At times his life seemed directly pitted against ours, yet we could not bring ourselves to run over his soft little body. It was the last straw. When the sickening distance down the canyon lessened, and we saw the cheery lights of the ranch through the fir trees, I nearly cried with relief.
“Will you come in,—you must be tired,” said a pretty Scotch voice. A little woman held a lantern. “Two ladies! We saw your lights, but never dreamed you’d be coming down in the dark. There’s many that think the road none too safe in the day.”
Her remark was balm to my chagrin at having let a jack-rabbit unnerve me. All our lives, it seemed, had been spent driving down the edge of hair-raising precipices in the dark; to be free of them at last, to enter a warm, lighted, snug cottage, where a friendly Papago servant led us to the cleanest, most luxurious of beds,—this was heaven.
Natural Bridge can be reached two ways from the world,—south from Flagstaff ninety miles, or by the Apache Trail from Globe or Tucson. The northern road lay under twenty feet of snow, and this while a huge apricot tree,—the oldest in the state,—bloomed pink, and the alfalfa floor of the little canyon was varnished with emerald. Next morning we looked on this budding and blossoming world, hedged in with red cliffs and lapis lazuli hills. A few neat cottages and farm buildings nestled together,—but where was the bridge, large enough we had been told, to hide three or four of the Virginian variety under its arch?