* * * * * In Phoenix I married my first wife, whose given name was Ruficia. Soon afterwards I moved to Tucson, where, after being awarded one child, I had domestic trouble which ended in the courts. My wife finally returned to Phoenix and, being free again, married a man named Murphy. After this experience I determined to take no further chances with matrimony. However, I needed a helpmate, so I solved the difficulty by marrying Paola Ortega by contract for five years. Contract marriages were universally recognized and indulged in in the West of the early days. My relations with Paola were eminently satisfactory until the expiration of the contract, when she went her way and I mine. Before I leave the subject of Phoenix it will be well to mention that when I left I sold all my property there, consisting of some twenty-two lots, all in the heart of the city, for practically a song. Six of these lots were situated where now is a big planing mill. Several lots I sold to a German for a span of mules. The German is alive today and lives in Phoenix a wealthy man, simply because he had the foresight and acumen to do what I did not do--hang on to his real estate. If I had kept those twenty-two lots until now, without doing more than simply pay my taxes on them, my fortune today would be comfortably up in the six figures. However, I sold the lots, and there's no use crying over spilled milk. Men are doing today all over the world just what I did then. I had not been in Tucson long before I built there the largest saloon and dance-hall in the Territory. Excepting for one flyer in Florence, which I shall speak of later on, this was to be my last venture into the liquor business. My hall was modeled after those on the Barbary Coast. It cost "four-bits" and drinks to dance, and the dances lasted only a few minutes. At one time I had thirteen Mexican girls dancing in the hall, and this number was increased on special days until the floor was crowded. I always did good business--so good, in fact, that jealousy aroused in the minds of my rivals finally forced me out. Since then, as I have said, with the single Florence exception, I have not been in the dance-hall business, excepting that I now have at some expense put a ballroom into my hotel at Patagonia, in which are held at times social dances which most of the young folk of the county attend, the liquor element being entirely absent, of course.[2]