too were the coyotes, leaner
than the rabbits, but efficient, shifty-eyed, and insolent. One could
admire but could hardly respect them.

I had entertained hopes of reaching Parker that evening, but supposed
the hour would be late if I reached it at all. Imagine my surprise,
then, when at half-past four I heard the whistle of a train, and
another turn revealed the Parker bridge. I had been told by others
that it had taken them three or four days to reach this point on a low
stage of water. Evidently the high water is much better for rapid and
interesting travel.

Here at the bridge, which was a hundred feet above the river, was a
dredge, and an old flat-bottomed steamboat, a relic of a few years
past, before the government built the Laguna dam above Yuma, and
condemned the Colorado as a navigable stream. Those were the days
which the Colorado steamboat men recall with as much fond remembrance
as the old-time boatmen of the Mississippi remember their palmy days.

In spite of the fact that the boats were flat-bottomed and small, it
was real steamboating of an exciting nature at least. At times they
beat up against the current as far as the mouth of the Rio Virgin. In
low water the channels shifted back and forth first choked with sand
on one side of the stream, then on the other. While the total fall
from Fort Mojave, a few miles above Needles, to the Gulf is only 525
feet, considerable of that fall came in short sections, first with a
swift descent, then in a quiet stretch. Even in the high-water stage I
was finding some such places.

Parker stood a mile back from the river, on top of the level gravelly
earth which stretched for miles on either side of the river clear to
the mountains. This earth and gravel mixture was so firmly packed that
even the cactus had a scant foothold. The town interested me for one
reason only, this being, that I could get my meals for the evening and
the following morning, instead of having to cook them myself. After I
had eaten them, however, there was a question in my mind if my own
cooking, bad as it was, would not have answered the purpose just as
well. The place was a new railroad town on an Indian reservation, a
town of great expectations, somewhat deferred.

It was not as interesting to me as my next stop at Ahrenburg, some
fifty miles below Parker. This place while nothing but a collection of
dilapidated adobe buildings, had an air of romance about it which was
missing in the ne