In Arizona 
V.—A Day’s Events—How the Old-Timer Lost 
His Burros and His Partner 
By J. W. SCHULTZ 
Author of “My Life as an Indian,” “Life Among the Blackfeet.” “Floating Down the Missouri." etc. 
T HE flaps of my tent are never closed day 
or night, except in stormy weather. 
When I awoke yesterday morning I 
could see from my cot not less than forty buz¬ 
zards circling and lowering above the camp. Up 
I jumped in my pajamas, thrust my feet into 
a pair of slippers without inspecting them for 
scorpions and centipedes, and hurried out to see 
my burros. “I hope it isn’t Ruminator,” I said 
to myself, but it was. I had tethered him to a 
forked trunk mesquite. He had reared up, evi¬ 
dently to get a mouthful of sprouting leaves and 
perchance had slipped. Anyhow, there he was, 
his neck wedged in the fork, his once sturdy 
body lying limply against the tree and trailing 
from it out on the ground. Poor fellow, he 
didn’t want to die any more than we do. Figur¬ 
atively speaking, I shed tears over his untimely 
fate, cooked and ate a melancholy breakfast and 
'went after Old-Timer to help me bury the poor 
old philosopher. Is there a part of him, I won¬ 
der, soul, spirit, ego, or whatever that has gone 
on ? 
Taking a couple of turns around the saddle 
horns with our riatas and vigorously pummel- 
ing our burros’ sides with our heels, we dragged 
Ruminator to the edge of a wash, rolled him 
into it and then with a stick of dynamite Old- 
Timer heaved a ton or two of earth from the 
cut bank down on top of him. My remaining 
burro bawled; bawled repeatedly. It was lonely 
enough. 
“Talk about burros dyin’ an’ all sorts of 
trouble, you ought to have been with me an’ 
Jim Holden the time we went down into the 
Sonora Mountains,” said the Old-Timer. We 
had finished our lunch at his camp and light¬ 
ing a cigarette I settled back comfortably to 
listen. “As you survived the troubles I am 
sorry that I wasn’t with you. After all the 
most pleasure one gets out of life is in risking 
it,” said I. 
“Yes, there’s somethin’ in that,” he agreed, 
“provided you risk it the right way—fightin’ an’ 
circumventin’ Injuns, tacklin’ a mad grizzly, or 
somethin’ of that kind; anythin’ at all except 
starvin’ or thirstin’. 
“Well, this time I’m tellin’ of, Jim an’ me 
outfitted in Tucson, ridin’ two an’ packin’ four 
burros with a big lot of beans an’ sowbelly, an’ 
flour, an’ such like, not forgettin’ plenty of car¬ 
tridges for our Henrys, an’ caps an’ powder an 
shot fer an’ old single-barrel smoothbore I got 
from a tenderfoot who was broke an’ needed 
two dollars. 
“We struck out up the Santa Cruz from Tuc¬ 
son on the old Injun trail Coronado is said to 
have followed when he came up into this coun¬ 
try in 1540 lookin’ for his seven gold cities 
which he never found. It was in January we 
started an’ the weather was nice an’ cool. Rains 
had filled the tanks an’ feed was good for the 
animals. We made good time, often as much 
as twenty-five miles a day, an’ at last leavin 
the Santa Cruz an’ swingin’ across the range 
into the Casa Grande Valley, up that an’ then 
to the west, we at last made a camp to our 
likin’ up in the pines an' oaks of the Sierra 
Madres. The formation sure gave us hope of 
findin’ somethin’ worth while. It was granite 
an’ porphyry an’ slate, the porphyry cuttin 
across the rest in fine big dykes, indicatin’ the 
real yellow stuff. Of course way off there an’ 
in them days—’twas long before the railroads 
came—we wa’n’t hankerin’ after quartz unless 
’twas rich enough to ’rasta out right on the 
ground. What we were lookin’ for was placer. 
“Say, you talk about game 1 That was the 
gamiest country I ever saw. Down on the plains 
lots of antelope, up where we were no end of 
deer, bear, mountain lions an’ turkeys. Why, 
turkeys were as plenty as quail are down there 
in the Gila Valley. We used to kill ’em with 
the old smooth-bore an’ rip out the fat breasts, 
an’ broil ’em on oak coals nice an’ brown. Man, 
but they was good! 
“We fixed up a fine camp, everythin’ handy 
an’ went to prospectin’ the bars of the creek. 
The very first pan of gravel we washed showed 
colors. Scrapin’ the bed rock we got a real 
good prospect, about half a cent of dust, fine, 
but not flaky. We went on up stream, a little 
further every day, takin’ in the rim rock an’ 
shallow bars an’ always findin’ enough to en¬ 
courage us; still, nothin’ yet that would pay. 
“The burros just wallered in green feed—it 
rained consid’able up there—an’ sure got fat. 
But one mornin’ when I went out to look at 
’em the one that was picketed lay dead, an’ it 
took us an hour to find the rest, by the bell tied 
to one of ’em. When we did come up to the 
bunch, sightin’ ’em all at once on the side of 
a ridge, they hoisted their tails an’ lit out, scared 
like, until we hollered at ’em. Then they stop¬ 
ped an’ looked back, made sure it was us, an’ 
let us catch ’em. 
“We thought it strange that the burro should 
die so quick, he bein’ well the night before. 
Heart disease, or maybe botts, we thought had 
done for him. Well, we put another one on 
the picket rope an’ the next mornin’ he was 
dead, too. We caught up another one an’ 
picketed it away over on the other side of the 
creek, but that didn’t make no difference. Just 
as soon as daylight broke we went over to see 
if he was all right. He was. He had gone on 
to burro grazin’ ground where there ain’t no 
packin’ to be done—nothin’ to do at all but just 
eat green stuff an’ lay around in the sunshine. 
“No, but jokin’ aside, this wasn’t only a big 
loss to us; it was sure puzzlin’. Three burros 
dead on the picket rope, those runnin’ loose 
healthy as ever. ‘Let’s hold a post mortium on 
this last one,’ Jim proposed, an’ I agreed. We 
ripped the burro open an’ examined the insides 
careful. The walls of the stomach were red¬ 
dish-like, the rest of him all right as far as we 
could see. It seemed that he must have died 
of poison. ‘Jim,’ said I, ‘somebody has doped 
these three burros that have died. That’s what’s 
the matter; they’ve been doped. The rest 
would have been fixed too if whoever ’twas 
could have caught ’em. He tried, too; that’s 
why they’ve been so scary-like lately; they’re 
plumb rattled an’ suspicious of everythin’.’ 
“ ‘Oh, shucks, your dreamin’, man,’ an’ he 
laughed. ‘Who would poison ’em? There isn’t 
a soul closer than that Mexican settlement forty 
mile or more down in the plains, an’ if there 
was, an’ they had it in for us, do you ’spose 
they would poison our burros? No, sir, they’d 
swipe ’em, or more likely ambush us first. We 
haven’t been any too watchful.’ 
“ ‘Well, you believe what you want to,’ I 
told him, ‘an’ I’ll do the same. I say that 
somebody has poisoned them animals.’ 
“The three that were left were jennys, an’ 
they were that lonesome for their dead part¬ 
ners that they kept bawlin’ an’ bawlin’ an’ wan¬ 
derin’ around lookin’ an’ smellin’ an’ cockin’ 
their ears in every direction. ‘Jim,’ said I, ‘you 
can do what you please, but I’m goin’ to picket 
one of ’em to-night an’ stand watch to see it 
die.’ 
“‘All right, old man,’ he agreed, ‘an’ just to 
please you I’ll sit up, too. Meantime, we got 
to go to work. Let’s hobble ’em for the day, 
so we won’t have to hunt any for ’em when we 
get back an’ all tired out.’ 
“We did that, went off up the creek to where 
we had left our tools an’ began prospectin’ the 
next bar. It showed up better; a cent or two 
