“Jim Coles, blacksmith at the O T, puts them braces in all our cars,” explained Bill.  “He’s got her down to a system.”

The repair finished and the radiator refilled we resumed the journey.  It was now just eleven o’clock.  The odometer reading was 29,276.  The temperature was well up toward 100 degrees.  But beneath the disreputable top, and while in motion, the heat was not noticeable.  Nevertheless, the brief stop had brought back poignantly certain old days—­choking dust, thirst, the heat of a heavy sun, the long day that led one nowhere——­

The noon mirages were taking shape, throwing stately and slow their vast illusions across the horizon.  Lakes glimmered; distant ranges took on the forms of phantasm, rising higher, flattening, reaching across space the arches of their spans, rendering unreal a world of beauty and dread.  That in the old days was the deliberate fashion the desert had of searing men’s souls with her majesty.  Slowly, slowly, the changes melted one into the other; massively, deliberately the face of the world was altered; so that at last the poor plodding human being, hot, dry, blinded, thirsty, felt himself a nothing in the presence of eternities.  Well I knew that old spell of the desert.  But now!  Honestly, after a few minutes I began to feel sorry for the poor old desert!  Its spells didn’t work for the simple reason that we didn’t give it time! We charged down on its phantom lakes and disproved them and forgot them.  We broke right in on the dignified and deliberate scene shifting of mountains and mesas, showed them up for the brittle, dry hills they were, and left them behind.  It was pitiful!  It was as though a revered tragedian should overnight find that his vogue had departed; that he was no longer getting over; that an irreverent upstart, breaking in on his most sonorous periods, was getting laughs with slang.  We had lots of water; the dust we left behind; it wasn’t even hot in the wind of our going!

In the shallow crease of hills a shimmer of white soon changed to evident houses.  We drew into a straggling desert town.

It was typical—­thirty miles from the railroad, a distributing point for the cattle country.  Four broad buildings with peeled, sunburned faces, a wooden house or so, and a dozen flat-roofed adobe huts hung pleasingly with long strips of red peppers.  Of course one of the wooden buildings was labelled General Store; and another, smaller, contained a barber shop and postoffice combined.  The third was barred and unoccupied.  The fourth had been a livery stable but was now a garage.  Six saddle horses and six Fords stood outside the General Store, which was a fair division.

Bill slowed down.

“Have a drink,” I observed, hospitably.

“Arizona’s a dry state,” Bill reminded me; but nevertheless stopped and uncoiled.  That unbelievable phenomenon had escaped my memory.  In the old days I used to shut my eyes and project my soul into what I imagined was the future.  I saw Arizona, embottled, dying in the last-wet ditch, while all the rest of the world, even including Milwaukee, bore down on her carrying the banners of Prohibition.  So much for prophecy.  I voiced a thought.