“You ain’t heard how I stopped the war,” said Kelly.
But we regretfully said we must push on. So, loaded with specimens of ore and good wishes, we sped away.
CHAPTER XI
FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH
IT was one of those days when everything goes wrong, and it fell on Friday the thirteenth.
Three days earlier, on reaching Globe, we learned we could not take the direct road to Santa Fe without chartering a steamer to ferry us across the untamed Gila. Most roads in Arizona are amphibious; to be ready for all emergencies, a motor traveling in that region of surprises should be equipped with skates, snow-shoes and web-feet. As our chosen road lay under some eight feet of river, we were obliged to make a slight detour of five hundred miles, or half the distance from Boston to Chicago. So we retraced the dizzy Winkleman trail, far less dizzy since we had become indifferent to tight-rope performances, passed through Tucson without attracting attention from the Sheriff of Pima County, and were rewarded for our digression by a sunset drive over the famous Tucson-Bisbee route, where a perfect road, built by convict labor, combined with perfect scenery to make our crossing of the Continental Divide for the dozenth time an event.
There are about as many Continental Divides in the West as beds in which Washington slept in the East. I first crossed the Divide somewhere up in Montana, and thinking it the only one of its kind, I was properly thrilled. But later I met another in Wyoming, and in the Southwest they seemed to crop up everywhere.
We were soon glad chance had sent us over the route we had discarded when we first entered Arizona. It was a mellow, gracious loveliness we passed, looking down from the top of the world on fields of silvery pampas, on stretches of velvet-brown grazing country, misted over with moon-white and sun-yellow poppies, and patches of wild heliotrope whose intoxicating scent tempted us to frequent stops. Then on again to overlook a magnificence of blue and ochre canyons, down which we swooped and circled into Bisbee.
Many-terraced as a Cornish village, Bisbee straddles a canyon and climbs two mountains in its effort to accommodate the workers who swarm its tortuous streets, and spend their days in its huge copper mines. When Bisbee finds a mountain in its way, down goes the mountain, carried off by great steam shovels working day and night. But always beyond, another ring of hills holds her prisoner. In the town’s center lies a tiny, shut-in square into which streets of various levels trickle. Here at any day or any hour, agitators of one sort or another violently harangue small groups. There is always at this spot an air of unexploded tenseness. No wonder! Precious minerals imprisoned by Nature,—machinery fighting Mother Earth,—labor resisting capital,—conservatism against lawless radicalism,—greed against greed,—all braced to hold their own and push the other down; all pent in by the enclosing hills, and pressed down to the narrow confines of the little Plaza. No wonder the steam from these conflicting forces has at times blown the lid into the air.
From this Plaza, during the war, gathered the citizens of Bisbee, and escorted to the Mexican border certain obstructionists claiming to be striking in the cause of labor. The suddenness of their taking off has been criticized, but its effectiveness was admirable. In the informality of the grim-purposed patriots who acted as body-guards on that dusty march south, one sees the old West, which emerged into law and order through similar bands of exasperated citizens.