Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/61

 Camp Grant was reached at last, and the prisoners turned over to the care of the guard, and Lieutenant Cushing, his first duty in the Territory accomplished with so much credit to himself and his men, made ready to start out on another and a longer trip just as soon as the signal should be given by the post commander.

Our troop was peculiarly situated. It had a second mount of ponies, captured from the Apaches against whom Cushing had done such good service in southwestern Texas. Orders came down in due time from San Francisco to turn them in and have them sold by the quartermaster; but until these orders came—and owing to the slowness of mail communications in those days, they did not come for several months—we had the advantage of being able to do nearly twice as much work as troops less fortunately placed.

The humdrum life of any post in Arizona in those days was enough to drive one crazy. The heat in most of them became simply unendurable, although here the great dryness of the atmosphere proved a benefit. Had the air been humid, very few of our garrison would now be alive to tell of temperatures of one hundred and twenty and over, and of days during the whole twenty-four hours of which the thermometer did not register below the one hundred notch.

There was a story current that the heat had one time become so excessive that two thermometers had to be strapped together to let the mercury have room to climb. That was before my arrival, and is something for which I do not care to vouch. I give the story as it was given to me by my friend, Jack Long, of whom I am soon to speak.

In every description of Arizona that I have ever seen, and I claim to be familiar with most if not all that has appeared in print, there occurs the story of the soldier who came back to Fort Yuma after his blankets, finding the next world too cold to suit him. I make reference to the story because many worthy people would find it hard to believe that a man had been in Arizona who did not tell this story in his first chapter, but it has grown to be such a mouldy military chestnut that I may be pardoned for omitting it.

There were all kinds of methods of killing the hours. One that interested everybody for a while was the battles which we stirred up between the nests of red and black ants, which could