blowing a dust storm to knock you off your feet when I reached Casa
Grande early in October; and a day later the rain was falling in floods.
The drive can be made with ease in an afternoon; but better give
yourself two days, and stay out for a night at the tents of Mr. Pinkey,
the Government Custodian of the ruins.

The ruin itself has been set aside as a perpetual monument. You drive
out over a low mesa of rolling mesquite and greasewood and cactus, where
the giant suaharo stands like a columned ghost of centuries of bygone
ages.

"How old are they?" I asked my driver, as we passed a huge cactus high
as a house and twisted in contortions as if in pain. From tip to root,
the great trunk was literally pitted with the holes pecked through by
little desert birds for water.

"Oh, centuries and centuries old," he said; "and the queer part is that
in this section of the mesa water is sixty feet below the surface. Their
roots don't go down sixty feet. Where do they get the water? I guess the
bark acts as cement or rubber preventing evaporation. The spines keep
the desert animals off, and during the rainy season the cactus drinks up
all the water he's going to need for the year, and stores it up in that
big tank reservoir of his. But his time is up round these parts;
settlers have homesteaded all round here for twenty-five miles, and next
time you come back we'll have orange groves and pecan orchards."

Far as you could look were the little adobe houses and white tents of
the pioneers, stretching barb wire lines round 160-acre patches of
mesquite with a faith to put Moses to shame when he struck the rock for
a spring. These settlers have to bore down the sixty feet to water level
with very inadequate tools; and you see little burros chasing homemade
windlasses round and round, to pump up water. It looks like "the faith
that lays it down and dies." Slow, hard sledding is this kind of
farming, but it is this kind of dauntless faith that made Phoenix and
made Yuma and made Imperial Valley. Twenty years ago, you could squat on
Imperial Valley Land. To-day it costs $1,000 an acre and yields high
percentage on that investment. To-day you can buy Casa Grande lands from
$5 to $25 an acre. Wait till the water is turned in the ditch, and it
will not seem such tedious work. If you want to know just how hard and
lonely it is, drive past the homesteads just at nightfall as I did. The
white tent stands in the middle of a barb wire fence