For the remainder of the day they climbed, camping at noon on the trail. As the day drew toward its close they found themselves surrounded by a vast forest, primeval as Evangeline’s, with no view of the desert offered. As dusk descended upon the mountains the trail began to grow painfully steeper, and then it swung about the brow of a rise in a long curve. Henry paused and looked back at his followers. “This here long curve here is Shirttail Bend,” he announced. “My cabin’s just around th’ corner.” The land rose sharply at the middle of the hairpin curve, and horses and burros panted as they struggled upward. They then reached a level shelf in the mountainside, a small plateau of perhaps five acres. In the centre of it, with the trail leading directly by, stood the tumble-down cabin of the erratic weather man. The cabin was built half of logs, half of boards from the lumber mill. A huge stone chimney promised the warmth of an open fireplace within. Climbing vines fingered the walls of the structure. A spring above it was the source of a tiny stream that trickled across the dooryard and fed a mat of watercress. Henry had gooseberry bushes and currant bushes, and there was a pear and apple orchard of a dozen trees. The water from the spring eventually found its way into a man-made ditch, from which it seeped onto a small patch of frost-nipped alfalfa. Henry’s dooryard was cluttered with every imaginable thing that had seen its day, from a grindstone whose three remaining legs sagged rheumatically beneath it to a hay rake with one wheel and a depleted set of teeth. There were pieces of rusty iron of all descriptions, old sets of hames, wagon wheels, joints of gaspipe of all sizes and lengths, lopped-over wagon seats, one of which had been hung as a swing, innumerable chains, sleds, broken pack-saddles, chicken coops upside-down, spewing mattresses, axles, an ancient dresser minus its mirror and resting placidly on its back, the iron-and-wood pedestal of an office swivel chair--and from every tree hung chains, frayed ropes, wagon-seat springs, iron hounds, countless horseshoes, more hames and other fragments of harness, and steel traps of every size. All these treasures, Henry confided to his guests, he had brought in, piece at a time, on the back of Lot’s Wife or his own sturdy shoulders, imagining that “sometime they might come in handy.” Often he had been obliged to dismember the larger pieces of junk--the hay rake, for example--and pack them in by sections. “Un Rincon Confusión,” Charmian promptly christened the place, which in Spanish is equivalent to “A Corner of Chaos.” Mary called it a whompus--which, she interpreted, was either a dish that she made of left-over boiled potatoes, bread crumbs, and sage, or a dog’s breakfast.