top of the stove. Naturally, we went outside with our visitors to
wish them "godspeed!"

"I'll never get married again; at least not in the land of the
shivaree," I told White Mountain as we tried to repair the damage.

I guess we were let off easy, for when our ranger friend returned with
his bride they suffered a much worse fate. The groom was locked for
hours in the old bear cage on the Rim, and his wife was loaded into a
wheelbarrow and rolled back and forth across the railroad tracks until
the Chief called a halt to that. He felt the treatment was a little too
severe even for people in love.

Since I could not go to live in the bachelor ranger quarters, White
Mountain moved into my cabin until our house could be completed. A tent
house was built for Stell in the back yard of our cabin. She was afraid
to live alone, and used to wake us at all hours of the night. Once she
came bursting into our cabin, hysterical with fright. A bunch of coyotes
had been racing around and around her tent trying to get into the
garbage can. They yelped and barked, and, finally, as she sobbed and
tried to explain, "They sat down in my door and laughed like crazy
people." She finished the night on our spare cot, for anybody that
thinks coyotes can't act like demons had better spend a night in Arizona
and listen to them perform.

Stell wasn't a coward by any means. She was right there when real
courage was needed. A broken leg to set or a corpse to bathe and dress
were just chores that needed to be done, and she did her share of both.
But seven thousand feet altitude for months at a time will draw a
woman's nerves tauter than violin strings. I remember, one morning,
Stell and I came home in the dawn after an all-night vigil with a dying
woman. We were both nearly asleep as we stumbled along through the
pines, but not too far gone to see Dollar Mark come charging at us. We
had stopped at the cookhouse and begged a pot of hot coffee to take to
our cabins. Stell was carrying it, and she stood her ground until the
mean old bull was within a few feet of her. Then she dashed the
boiling-hot coffee full in his gleaming red eyes, and while he snorted
and bellowed with pain we shinnied up a juniper tree and hung there like
some of our ancestors until the road crew came along and drove him away.
We were pretty mad, and made a few sarcastic remarks about a ranger
force that couldn't even "shoot the bull." We requested the loan of a
gun, if necess