early dead by this time, with the
heat, and the fatigue of all this hard travelling and packing up, that
the keener edge of my emotions was dulled. Eight days and nights spent
in travelling hither and thither over those hot plains in Southern
Arizona, and all for what?

Because somebody in ordering somebody to change his station, had
forgotten that somebody's regiment was about to be ordered out of the
country it had been in for four years. Also because my husband was a
soldier who obeyed orders without questioning them. If he had been a
political wire-puller, many of our misfortunes might have been averted.
But then, while I half envied the wives of the wire-pullers, I took a
sort of pride in the blind obedience shown by my own particular soldier
to the orders he received.

After that week's experience, I held another colloquy with myself, and
decided that wives should not follow their husbands in the army, and
that if I ever got back East again, I would stay: I simply could not go
on enduring these unmitigated and unreasonable hardships.

The Florence man staid over at the post a day or so to rest his ponies.
I bade him good-bye and told him to take care of those brave little
beasts, which had travelled seventy miles without rest, to bring us
to our destination. He nodded pleasantly and drove away. "A queer
customer," I observed to Jack.

"Yes," answered he, "they told me in Florence that he was a 'road agent'
and desperado, but there did not seem to be anyone else, and my orders
were peremptory, so I took him. I knew the ponies could pull us through,
by the looks of them; and road agents are all right with army officers,
they know they wouldn't get anything if they held 'em up."

"How much did he charge you for the trip?" I asked.

"Sixteen dollars," was the reply. And so ended the episode. Except that
I looked back to Picket Post with a sort of horror, I thought no more
about it.

CHAPTER XXVII. THE EIGHTH FOOT LEAVES ARIZONA

And now after the eight days of most distressing heat, and the fatigue
of all sorts and varieties of travelling, the nights spent in a
stage-coach or at a desert inn, or in the road agent's buckboard,
holding always my little son close to my side, came six days more of
journeying down the valley of the Gila.

We took supper in Phoenix, at a place known as "Devine's." I was hearing
a good deal about Phoenix; for even then, its gardens, its orchards
and its climate were becoming