erritorial Delegate from
Arizona." He handed me his card.

"I'm just from Washington," said I.

"Well, I've not been there this session. Important law business has
detained me here. Yes, they backed Mowry in that election. The old
spittoon had quite a following, but he hadn't the cash. That gives you
some idea of the low standards I have to combat. But I hadn't to spend
much. This Territory's so poor they come cheap. Seventy-five cents a
head for all the votes I wanted in Bisbee, Nogales, and Yuma; and up
here the Bishop was my good friend. Holding office booms my business
some, and that's why I took it, of course. But I've had low standards to
fight."

The Territorial Delegate now talked freely of Arizona's frontier life.
"It's all dead," he said, forgetting in his fluency what he had told me
about Seven-Mile Mesquite and last October. "We have a community as high
toned as any in the land. Our monumental activity--" And here he went
off like a cuckoo clock, or the Boy Orator, reciting the glories of
Phoenix and Salt River, and the future of silver, in that special
dialect of platitudes which is spoken by our more talkative statesmen,
and is not quite Latin, quite grammar, or quite falsehood. "We're not
all Mowrys and Adamses," said he, landing from his flight.

"In a population of fifty-nine thousand," said I, heartily, "a stranger
is bound to meet decent people if he keeps on."

Again he misinterpreted me, but this time the other way, bowing like one
who acknowledges a compliment; and we came to Solomonsville in such
peace that he would have been astonished at my private thoughts. For I
had met no undisguised vagabond nor out-and-out tramp whom I did not
prefer to Luke Jenks, vote-buyer and politician. With his catch-penny
plausibility, his thin-spread good-fellowship, and his New York clothes,
he mistook himself for a respectable man, and I was glad to be done with
him.

I could have reached Thomas that evening, but after our noon dinner let
the stage go on, and delayed a night for the sake of seeing the Bishop
hold service next day, which was Sunday, some few miles down the
valley. I was curious to learn the Mormon ritual and what might be the
doctrines that such a man as the Bishop would expound. It dashed me a
little to find this would cost me forty-eight hours of Solomonsville, no
Sunday stage running. But one friendly English-speaking family--the town
was chiefly Mexican--made some of my hours pleasant, a