. "My God! you've pulled the
wrong tooth!" cried she, and so he had.

I seized a jug of red wine which stood near by, and poured out a
gobletful, which she drank. The blood came freely from her mouth, and I
feared something dreadful had happened.

Fisher declared she had shown him the wrong tooth, and was perfectly
willing to try again. I could not witness the second attempt, so I put
the candle down and fled.

The stout-hearted and confiding girl allowed the second trial, and
between the steamboat agent, the Lieutenant, and the red wine, the
aching molar was finally extracted.

This was a serious and painful occurrence. It did not cause any of us
to laugh, at the time. I am sure that Ellen, at least, never saw the
comical side of it.

When it was all over, I thanked Fisher, and Jack beamed upon me with:
"You see, Mattie, my case of instruments did come in handy, after all."

Encouraged by success, he applied for a pannier of medicines, and the
Ehrenberg citizens soon regarded him as a healer. At a certain hour in
the morning, the sick ones came to his office, and he dispensed simple
drugs to them and was enabled to do much good. He seemed to have a sort
of intuitive knowledge about medicines and performed some miraculous
cures, but acquired little or no facility in the use of the language.

I was often called in as interpreter, and with the help of the sign
language, and the little I knew of Spanish, we managed to get an idea of
the ailments of these poor people.

And so our life flowed on in that desolate spot, by the banks of the
Great Colorado.

I rarely went outside the enclosure, except for my bath in the river at
daylight, or for some urgent matter. The one street along the river was
hot and sandy and neglected. One had not only to wade through the sand,
but to step over the dried heads or horns or bones of animals left there
to whiten where they died, or thrown out, possibly, when some one killed
a sheep or beef. Nothing decayed there, but dried and baked hard in that
wonderful air and sun.

Then, the groups of Indians, squaws and halfbreeds loafing around the
village and the store! One never felt sure what one was to meet, and
although by this time I tolerated about everything that I had been
taught to think wicked or immoral, still, in Ehrenberg, the limit was
reached, in the sights I saw on the village streets, too bold and too
rude to be described in these pages.

The few white men there led re