Lunch had been despatched, and I was lounging, with a book in my hand, on the seat of the ambulance,--one of those uncomfortable affairs called "dead-carts," with two seats running the entire length of the vehicle,--when the captain put his head in to say that there was an American woman at the station. White representatives of my sex are "few and far between" in Arizona, and I had made up my mind to go into the house and speak to this one, even before the captain had added: "It is the woman from Mohawk Station." The captain assisted me out of the ambulance, and we walked toward the house together. The front room of the flat _adobe_ building was bar-room, store, office, parlor; the back room was kitchen, dining-room, bed-room; and here we found "the woman of Mohawk Station." I entered the back room, at the polite invitation of the station-keeper, with whom the captain fell into conversation in the store or bar-room. The woman was young--not over twenty-five--and had been on the way from Texas to California, with her husband and an ox-team, when Mr. Hendricks, the man who kept the forage-station at Mohawk, found them camped near the house one day, and induced them to stop with him. The woman took charge of the household, and the man worked at cutting firewood on the Gila and hauling it up to the house with the station-keeper's two horses, or at any other job which Mr. Hendricks might require of him. She had been a healthy, hearty woman when they left Texas; but laboring through the hot, sandy deserts, suffering often for water and sometimes for food, had considerably "shaken her," and she was glad and willing to stop here, where both she and her husband could earn money, and they wanted for neither water nor food--such as it is in Arizona. It was hard to believe she had ever been a robust, fearless woman, as she sat there cowering and shivering, and looking up at me with eyes that seemed ready to start from their sockets with terror. "May I come in?" I asked, uncertain whether to venture closer to the shrinking form. "Yes, yes," she said, breathing hard, and speaking very slowly. "Come in. It'll do me good. You're the first woman I've seen since--since--" "Tell me all about it," I said, sitting down on the edge of the bed, as familiarly as though I had been her intimate friend for years; "or will it agitate you and make you sick?" "No," she made answer; "I am dying now, and I have often and often wished I could see some woman and tell her the whole story before I die. It almost chokes me sometimes because I can't speak about it; and yet I always, always, think about it. I haven't seen any one but my husband and the station-keeper these last three weeks--there is so little travel now.