“Never for that reason,” I said, thinking to make a graceful exit from the dilemma, “still if all the stories you have told us of wild animals and outlaws——”
Biron blocked my exit; “You needn’t worry about them,” he chuckled mirthfully, “But you don’t know what ructions we may raise in the night.”
“Better take it,” Toby whispered. So we bore our arms to our tent, where they helped us pass a restless night. When I did not wake in a cold agony from dreaming I had rolled over on the pistol and exploded it, Toby would wake me to warn me against the same fate. I think we would have been happier if we had relied on the honor system. Once a shriek and a roar startled us awake, and a half mile away a Southern Pacific express streamed by like a silver streak. Occasionally a placid snore from Tucson reached us, and once an old white ghost of a horse, her bones making blue shadows in the moonlight, crunched at our tent posts, and fled kicking terrified kicks as I looked out to investigate.
Later sleep came, deep sleep, from which Toby woke me. Toby is brave, but her whisper had a tremolo. “There’s a wild animal of some sort, butting against the tent.”
I looked out cautiously. “It’s a huge bull,” I reported. Toby shuddered. A moment later I saw it was only a moderate sized cow, but to impress Toby I did not mention this discovery, as I boldly left the tent and approached the beast. She was chewing with gusto a shapeless mass lying on the ground,—was it a calf? Was she a cannibal among cows, an unnatural mother? She muzzled it, licked it, and tossed it in the air, where against the setting moon her smile of delight was silhouetted like the cow in Mother Goose. I took courage to investigate her new form of caviar,—and found she had chewed our new yellow slicker, in which we wrapped everything which would not go anywhere else, into a slimy, pulpy mass. To her hurt astonishment, she was immediately parted from her find, and went galloping off into the brush. It seemed cruel to break up her midnight revel, but at the rate her new taste was developing we should not have had a tire left by morning.
Before going back to sleep, I looked about me. Long gray shadows drifted over from the low range of black hills which cupped our camp. The air, crisp, and faintly scented with sage, exhilarated me with a sense of wild freedom. Often, in the East, I am awakened by that scent, and am filled with a homesick longing to go back. It is not sage alone, but the thousands of little aromatic plants graying the desert imperceptibly, the odor blown across hills and plains of charred camp fires, bitter and pungent, the strong smell of bacon and sweated leather, all mingled and purified in millions of cubic feet of ether. Two blue-black masses stirred, and a sigh and a chuckle came from our sleeping Galahads. No danger of “ructions” from that quarter now. I went back to our lumpy bed, put the revolver outside the tent, and fastened the flap. A few minutes sped by, and I was startled awake by a gunshot, thunderous in my ears.
Toby and I sat up. It was broad daylight. We peered under the car cautiously. Tucson had built a fire, and a coffee-pot sat atop, which he soberly tended. Biron swanked about in his fleecy chaps, shooting into the air.
“Come alive, girls,” he called, tossing a flapjack at us. “Throw that into your sunburned hides.”
We obeyed this playboy of our Western world without demur. We had barely eaten since the previous morning. At eight we were off. Our car had no spare tire, two broken spring leaves, and a dustpan which dragged on the ground, loosened by miles of high centers. Our friends were in haste to reach El Paso, so we suggested they leave us, but they refused, and became our body guard as far as Deming, stopping when we did, mending our dustpan with a bit of stolen fence wire, getting water and gas for us at Hachita, a dismal little collection of shanties which Biron regretfully described as “the wickedest town in the United States, before prohibition spoiled it. Yessir, prohibition is what ruined New Mexico.”
In the midst of a swirling sand storm we said good-by to our friends and asked their names and addresses in order to send them some photographs we had taken. Biron gave his readily,—“Manchester, N. H., is where I was born, but most of my folks live in Fall River, Mass.”