rse of my
duties as ward-room steward to do some marketing and take the officers'
laundry to be washed. Instead of bringing the marketing back to the ship
I sent it, together with a note telling where the laundry would be
found, and saying good-bye forever to my shipmates. The note written and
dispatched, I quietly "vamoosed," or, as I believe it is popularly
termed in the navy now, I "went over the hill."

My primary excuse for this action was, of course, the outbreak of
smallpox, which at that time and in fact until very recently, was as
greatly dreaded as bubonic plague is now, and probably more.
Vaccination, whatever may be its value in the prevention of the
disease, had not been discovered in the sense that it is now understood
and was not known at all except in the centers of medical practice in
the East.

Smallpox then was a mysterious disease, and certainly a plague. Whole
populations had been wiped out by it, doctors had announced that there
was practically no cure for it and that its contraction meant almost
certain death, and I may thus be excused for my fear of the sickness. I
venture to state, moreover, that if all the men aboard the Jamestown had
had the same opportunity that I was given to desert, they would have
done so in a body.

My second excuse, reader, if one is necessary, is that in the days of
the Jamestown and her sister ships, navy life was very different from
the navy life of today, when I understand generous paymasters are even
giving the jackies ice-cream with their meals. You may be entirely sure
that we got nothing of the kind. Our food was bad, our quarters were
worse, and the discipline was unbearably severe.

THROUGH MEXICO AND BACK TO ARIZONA

"_Know thou the spell of the desert land,
Where Life and Love are free?
Know thou the lure the sky and sand
Hath for the man in me?_"

When I deserted from the sloop-o'-war Jamestown it was with the no
uncertain knowledge that it was distinctly to my best advantage to clear
out of the city of Mazatlan just as rapidly as I could, for the ships of
the free and (presumably) enlightened Republic had not yet swerved
altogether from the customs of the King's Navee, one of which said
customs was to hang deserters at the yard-arm. Sometimes they shot them,
but I do not remember that the gentlemen most concerned had any choice
in the matter. At any rate, I know that it was with a distinct feeling
of relief that I covere