How brief the span of a year!  Here I was in Flagstaff again outfitting for another hunt.  It seemed incredible.  It revived that old haunting thought about the shortness of life.  But in spite of that or perhaps more because of it the pleasure was all the keener.  In truth the only drawback to this start was the absence of Romer, and my poor physical condition.  R.C. appeared to be in fine fettle.

But I was not well.  In the mornings I could scarcely arise, and when I did so I could hardly straighten myself.  More than once I grew doubtful of my strength to undertake such a hard trip.  This doubt I fought fiercely, for I knew that the right thing for me to do was to go—­to stand the pain and hardship—­to toil along until my old strength and elasticity returned.  What an opportunity to try out my favorite theory!  For I believed that labor and pain were good for mankind—­that strenuous life in the open would cure any bodily ill.

On September fourteenth Edd and George drifted into Flagstaff to join us, and their report of game and water and grass and acorns was so favorable that I would have gone if I had been unable to ride on anything but a wagon.

We got away on September fifteenth at two-thirty o’clock with such an outfit as I had never had in all my many trips put together.  We had a string of saddle horses besides those the men rode.  They were surely a spirited bunch; and that first day it was indeed a job to keep them with us.  Out of sheer defiance with myself I started on Don Carlos.  He was no trouble, except that it took all my strength to hold him in.  He tossed his head, champed his bit, and pranced sideways along the streets of Flagstaff, manifestly to show off his brand new black Mexican saddle, with silver trappings and tapaderos.  I was sure that he did not do that to show me off.  But Don liked to dance and prance along before a crowd, a habit that he had acquired with the motion pictures.

Lee and Nielsen and George had their difficulties driving the free horses.  Takahashi rode a little buckskin Navajo mustang.  An evidence of how extremely short the Jap’s legs were made itself plain in the fact that stirrups could not be fixed so he could reach them with his feet.  When he used any support at all he stuck his feet through the straps above the stirrups.  How funny his squat, broad figure looked in a saddle!  Evidently he was not accustomed to horses.  When I saw the mustang roll the white of his eyes and glance back at Takahashi then I knew something would happen sooner or later.

Nineteen miles on Don Carlos reduced me to a miserable aching specimen of manhood.  But what made me endure and go on and finish to camp was the strange fact that the longer I rode the less my back pained.  Other parts of my anatomy, however, grew sorer as we progressed.  Don Carlos pleased me immensely, only I feared he was too much horse for me.  A Mormon friend of mine, an Indian trader, looked Don over in Flagstaff, and pronounced him:  “Shore one grand hoss!” This man had broken many wild horses, and his compliment pleased me.  All the same the nineteen miles on Don hurt my vanity almost as much as my body.