ll held up the Ehrenberg stage. Well, I guess I'll be
seeing how the boys are getting along."

With that he moved away. A loud disturbance of chairs and broken glass
had set up in the house across the railroad, and I watched the
proprietor shamble from me with his deliberate gait towards the
establishment that paid him best. He had left me possessor of much
incomplete knowledge, and I waited for him, pacing the platform; but he
did not return, and as I judged it inexpedient to follow him, I went to
my bed on the tourist side of the track.

In the morning the stage went early, and as our road seemed to promise
but little variety--I could see nothing but an empty plain--I was glad
to find my single fellow-passenger a man inclined to talk. I did not
like his mustache, which was too large for his face, nor his too careful
civility and arrangement of words; but he was genial to excess, and
thoughtful of my comfort.

"I beg you will not allow my valise to incommode you," was one of his
first remarks; and I liked this consideration better than any Mr. Mowry
had shown me. "I fear you will detect much initial primitiveness in our
methods of transportation," he said.

This again called for gracious assurances on my part, and for a while
our polite phrases balanced to corners until I was mentally winded
keeping up such a pace of manners. The train had just brought him from
Tucson, he told me, and would I indulge? On this we shared and
complimented each other's whiskey.

"From your flask I take it that you are a Gentile," said he, smiling.

"If you mean tenderfoot," said I, "let me confess at once that flask and
owner are from the East, and brand-new in Arizona."

"I mean you're not a Mormon. Most strangers to me up this way are. But
they carry their liquor in a plain flat bottle like this."

"Are you a--a--" Embarrassment took me as it would were I to check
myself on the verge of asking a courteously disposed stranger if he had
ever embezzled.

"Oh, I'm no Mormon," my new friend said, with a chuckle, and I was glad
to hear him come down to reasonable English. "But Gentiles are in the
minority in this valley."

"I didn't know we'd got to the valleys yet," said I, eagerly, connecting
Mormons with fertility and jasmine. And I lifted the flaps of the stage,
first one side and then the other, and saw the desert everywhere flat,
treeless, and staring like an eye without a lid.

"This is the San Simon Valley we've been in al