Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/81

 to the old rookery, which shone all the more lustrously now that we were saying farewell.

We had never felt lonesome by any means. There was always something going on, always something to do, always something to see.

The sunrises were gorgeous to look upon at the hour for morning stables, when a golden and rosy flush bathed the purple peaks of the Pinaleño, and at eventide there were great banks of crimson and purple and golden clouds in the western horizon which no painter would have dared depict upon canvas.

There were opportunities for learning something about mineralogy in the "wash" of the cañons, botany on the hill-sides, and insect life and reptile life everywhere. Spanish could be picked up from Mexican guides and packers, and much that was quaint and interesting in savage life learned from an observation of the manners of the captives—representatives of that race which the Americans have so frequently fought, so generally mismanaged, and so completely failed to understand.

There was much rough work under the hardest of conditions, and the best school for learning how to care for men and animals in presence of a sleepless enemy, which no amount of "book l'arnin'" could supply.

The distance from Old Camp Grant to Tucson, Arizona, over the wagon-road, was fifty-five measured miles. The first half of the journey, the first day's march—as far as the Cañon del Oro—has already been described. From the gloomy walls of the shady cañon, in which tradition says gold was found in abundance in the earliest days of occupation by the Caucasians, the wagons rolled rapidly over the Eight-mile Mesa, over some slightly hilly and sandy country, until after passing the Riito, when Tucson came in sight and the road became firmer. All the way, on both sides of the road, and as far as eye could reach, we had in sight the stately mescal, loaded with lovely velvety flowers; the white-plumed Spanish bayonet, the sickly green palo verde, without a leaf; the cholla, the nopal, the mesquite, whose "beans" were rapidly ripening in the sultry sun, and the majestic "pitahaya," or candelabrum cactus, whose ruby fruit had long since been raided upon and carried off by flocks of bright-winged humming-birds, than which no fairer or more alert can be seen this side of Brazil. The "pitahaya" attains a