And now after the eight days of most distressing¹ heat, and the fatigue² of all sorts and varieties of travelling, the nights spent in a stage-coach or at a desert inn, or in the road agent's buckboard, holding always my little son close to my side, came six days more of journeying down the valley of the Gila.  
We took supper in Phoenix³, at a place known as "Devine's." I was hearing a good deal about Phoenix; for even then, its gardens, its orchards⁴ and its climate were becoming famous, but the season of the year was unpropitious to form a favorable opinion of that thriving place, even if my opinions of Arizona, with its parched-up soil and insufferable heat, had not been formed already.
 
We crossed the Gila somewhere below there, and stopped at our old camping places, but the entire valley was seething⁵ hot, and the remembrance of the December journey seemed but an aggravating⁶ dream.
 
We joined Captain Corliss and the company at Antelope⁷ Station, and in two more days were at Yuma City. By this time, the Southern Pacific Railroad had been built as far as Yuma, and a bridge thrown across the Colorado at this point. It seemed an incongruity⁸. And how burning hot the cars looked, standing⁹ there in the Arizona sun!
 
After four years in that Territory, and remembering the days, weeks, and even months spent in travelling on the river, or marching through the deserts, I could not make the Pullman cars seem a reality.
 
We brushed the dust of the Gila Valley from our clothes, I unearthed¹⁰ a hat from somewhere, and some wraps which had not seen the light for nearly two years, and prep............