nd
tossed his head as if to say I was a strange rider for him. Like my
mustang, Night, he would not stand to be mounted. When I touched the
stirrup that was a signal to go. He had been trained to it. As he was
nearly seventeen hands high, and as I could not get my foot in the
stirrup from level ground, to mount him in my condition seemed little
less than terrible. I always held back out of sight when I attempted
this. Many times I failed. Once I fell flat and lay a moment in the
dust. Don Carlos looked down upon me in a way I imagined was
sympathetic. At least he bent his noble head and smelled at me. I
scrambled to my feet, led him round into a low place, and drawing a deep
breath, and nerving myself to endure the pain like a stab, I got into
the saddle again.

Two things sustained me in this ordeal, which was the crudest horseback
ride I ever had--first, the conviction that I could cure my ills by
enduring the agony of violent action, of hot sun, of hard bed; and
secondly, the knowledge that after it was all over the remembrance of
hardship and achievement would be singularly sweet. So it had been in
the case of the five days on the old Crook road in 1918, when extreme
worry and tremendous exertion had made the hours hideous. So it had been
with other arduous and poignant experiences. A poet said that the crown
of sorrow was in remembering happier times: I believed that there was a
great deal of happiness in remembering times of stress, of despair, of
extreme and hazardous effort. Anyway, without these two feelings in my
mind I would have given up riding Don Carlos that day, and have
abandoned the trip.

We covered twenty-two miles by sundown, a rather poor day's showing; and
camped on the bare flat desert, using water and wood we had packed with
us. The last thing I remembered, as my eyes closed heavily, was what a
blessing it was to rest and to sleep.

Next day we sheered off to the southward, heading toward Chevelon Butte,
a black cedared mountain, rising lone out of the desert, thirty miles
away. We crossed two streams bank full of water, a circumstance I never
before saw in Arizona. Everywhere too the grass was high. We climbed
gradually all day, everybody sunburned and weary, the horses settling
down to save themselves; and we camped high up on the desert plateau,
six thousand feet above sea level, where it was windy, cool, and
fragrant with sage and cedar. Except the first few, the hours of this
day each ma