There was but very little out of the usual routine of travel for a day or two, until we came to the third crossing of the Casas Grandes River, at a point so near its entrance into Laguna Guzman that we felt sure we would have no trouble in getting over. For, as I have already explained, most of the rivers in this country are larger the nearer you approach their heads. There had been no rains to swell the streams, and our surprise can therefore be imagined when, upon reaching the river, we found it a raging torrent. A long experience had taught me that it does not pay to await the falling of a swollen river; so we set at work to get over the obstreperous stream. The loads were all piled on the seats, above the empty wagon beds, which, being thus weighted and top-heavy, acted like so many boats when they dashed into the river. Our driver, a Mexican, had the worst of it in a low, light wagon, drawn by two small pinto bronchos. The flood swept him down stream under an overhanging clump of willows, despite a rope tied to the tongue of the wagon and another held firmly by a half dozen persons on the upstream side. But he was as cool at the head as at the feet, although he was knee deep in ice water at the time as he stood up in the wagon bed. After waiting a moment to allow the horses to regain their bewildered senses, he swam them upstream to the crossing, and the men, with a whoop and a yell, dragged the whole affair on shore, looking like drowned rats tied to a cigar box. We were three hours and a quarter getting over that river, and felt as if we could have drowned the man who wrote that Northern Mexico is a vast, waterless tract of country. [Illustration: CROSSING THE CASAS GRANDES RIVER.] CHAPTER III. SONORA--ALONG THE SONORA RAILWAY--HERMOSILLO--GUAYMAS, AND ITS BEAUTIFUL HARBOR--FISHING AND HUNTING ABOUT GUAYMAS. From Deming, N. M., it is but a five or six hours' ride by rail to Benson in Arizona, the initial point of the Sonora railway, a branch of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé, and extending to the seaport of Guaymas in Mexico. The ride from Benson consumes two days, and the route is through the mountains, down the lovely, fertile valleys, and across the flat, tropical country of the seacoast. It is a ride of great novelty and of surpassing beauty throughout the entire distance. After the train reached Nogalles, a town which is half in the United States and half in Mexico, it was made up in regular Mexican fashion of first, second, and third class coaches; and, from the number of Mexicans aboard, it appeared they were as much given to travel as their more active neighbors of the North; with this difference, however: that where they can save a penny by going second or third class they do so. This fact removes an interesting feature of Mexican travel from the sight of the average American tourist, for, as a rule, he prefers comfort to the study of the picturesque in his fellow-travelers.