We camped in a cedar pasture off the main road.  This road was a new one for us to take to our hunting grounds.  I was too bunged up to help Nielsen pitch our tent.  In fact when I sat down I was anchored.  Still I could use my eyes, and that made life worth living.  Sunset was a gorgeous spectacle.  The San Francisco Peaks were shrouded in purple storm-clouds, and the west was all gold and silver, with low clouds rimmed in red.  This sunset ended in a great flare of dull magenta with a background of purple.

That evening was the try-out of our new chuck-box and chef.  I had supplied the men with their own outfit and supplies, to do with as they liked, an arrangement I found to be most satisfactory.  Takahashi was to take care of R.C. and me.  In less than half an hour from the time the Jap lighted a fire he served the best supper I ever had in camp anywhere.  R.C. lauded him to the skies.  And I began to think I could unburden myself of my conviction.

I did not awaken to the old zest and thrill of the open.  Something was wrong with me.  The sunset, the camp-fire, the dark clear night with its trains of stars, the distant yelp of coyotes—­these seemed less to me than what I had hoped for.  My feelings were locked round my discomfort and pain.

About noon next day we rode out of the cedars into the open desert—­a rolling, level land covered with fine grass, and yellow daisies, Indian paint brush, and a golden flowering weed.  This luxuriance attested to the copious and recent rains.  They had been a boon to dry Arizona.  No sage showed or greasewood, and very few rocks.  The sun burned hot.  I gazed out at the desert, and the cloud pageant in the sky, trying hard to forget myself, and to see what I knew was there for me.  Rolling columnar white and cream clouds, majestic and beautiful, formed storms off on the horizon.  Sunset on the open desert that afternoon was singularly characteristic of Arizona—­purple and gold and red, with long lanes of blue between the colored cloud banks.

We made camp at Meteor Crater, one of the many wonders of this wonderland.  It was a huge hole in the earth over five hundred feet deep, said to have been made by a meteor burying itself there.  Seen from the outside the slope was gradual up to the edges, which were scalloped and irregular; on the inside the walls were precipitous.  Our camp was on the windy desert, a long sweeping range of grass, sloping down, dotted with cattle, with buttes and mountains in the distance.  Most of my sensations of the day partook of the nature of woe.

September seventeenth bade fair to be my worst day—­at least I did not see how any other could ever be so bad.  Glaring hot sun—­reflected heat from I the bare road—­dust and sand and wind!  Particularly hard on me were what the Arizonians called dust-devils, whirlwinds of sand.  On and off I walked a good many miles, the latter of which I hobbled.  Don Carlos did not know what to make of this.