ing what I should do after we got on board the ocean steamer. I,
a victim of seasickness, with this unlucky woman and her child on
my hands, in addition to my own! No; I made up my mind to go back to
Ehrenberg, but I said nothing.

I did not dare to let Doctor Clark know of my decision, for I knew he
would try to dissuade me; but when we reached the mouth of the river,
and they began to transfer the passengers to the ocean steamer which
lay in the offing, I quietly sat down upon my trunk and told them I
was going back to Ehrenberg. Captain Mellon grinned; the others were
speechless; they tried persuasion, but saw it was useless; and then they
said good-bye to me, and our stern-wheeler headed about and started for
up river.

Ehrenberg had become truly my old man of the sea; I could not get rid of
it. There I must go, and there I must stay, until circumstances and the
Fates were more propitious for my departure.

CHAPTER XIX. SUMMER AT EHRENBERG

The week we spent going up the Colorado in June was not as uncomfortable
as the time spent on the river in August of the previous year.
Everything is relative, I discovered, and I was happy in going back
to stay with the First Lieutenant of C Company, and share his fortunes
awhile longer.

Patrocina recovered, as soon as she found we were to return to
Ehrenberg. I wondered how anybody could be so homesick for such a
God-forsaken place. I asked her if she had ever seen a tree, or green
grass (for I could talk with her quite easily now). She shook her
mournful head. "But don't you want to see trees and grass and flowers?"

Another sad shake of the head was the only reply.

Such people, such natures, and such lives, were incomprehensible to me
then. I could not look at things except from my own standpoint.

She took her child upon her knee, and lighted a cigarette; I took mine
upon my knee, and gazed at the river banks: they were now old friends: I
had gazed at them many times before; how much I had experienced, and how
much had happened since I first saw them! Could it be that I should ever
come to love them, and the pungent smell of the arrow-weed which covered
them to the water's edge?

The huge mosquitoes swarmed over us in the nights from those thick
clumps of arrow-weed and willow, and the nets with which Captain Mellon
provided us did not afford much protection.

The June heat was bad enough, though not quite so stifling as the August
heat. I was becoming ac