rote
my name in the hotel book, while he looked to remind himself what it
was.

"Why, you're not to stay here," said Stirling, coming up. "You're
expected at the Barracks."

He presented me at once to a knot of officers, each of whom in turn made
me known to some additional by-stander, until it seemed to me that I
shook a new hand sixty times in this disordered minute by the hotel
book, and out of the sixty caught one name, which was my own.

These many meetings could not be made perfect without help from the
saloon-keeper, who ran his thriving trade conveniently at hand in the
office of the San Xavier. Our group remained near him, and I silently
resolved to sleep here at the hotel, away from the tempting confusion of
army hospitality upon this eve of our trial. We were expected, however,
to dine at the post, and that I was ready to do. Indeed, I could
scarcely have got myself out of it without rudeness, for the ambulance
was waiting us guests at the gate. We went to it along a latticed
passage at the edge of a tropical garden, only a few square yards in
all, but how pretty! and what an oasis of calm in the midst of this
teeming desolation of unrest! It had upon one side the railway station,
wooden, sordid, congesting with malodorous packed humanity; on the next
the rails themselves and the platform, with steam and bells and baggage
trucks rolling and bumping; the hotel stood on the third, a confusion
of tongues and trampings; while a wide space of dust, knee-deep, and
littered with manoeuvring vehicles, hemmed in this silent garden on
the fourth side. A slender slow little fountain dropped inaudibly among
some palms, a giant cactus, and the broad-spread shade of trees I did
not know. This was the whole garden, and a tame young antelope was its
inhabitant. He lay in the unchanging shade, his large eyes fixed
remotely upon the turmoil of this world, and a sleepy charm touched my
senses as I looked at his domain. Instead of going to dinner, or going
anywhere, I should have liked to recline indefinitely beneath those
palms and trail my fingers in the cool fountain. Such enlightened
languor, however, could by no happy chance be the lot of an important
witness in a Western robbery trial, and I dined and wined with the
jovial officers, at least talking no business.

With business I was sated. Pidcock and the attorney for the United
States--I can remember neither his name nor the proper title of his
office, for he was a n