“Jim and I had five hundred dollars saved toward a house,” confided one gray-haired gambler, “so we bought Bear Cat at a cent a share. If it goes to a dollar, like the land next it, we’ve got fifty thousand. If it don’t, why, what can you get with five hundred anyway, these days?” “Way I do is to buy some of everything,” said the hairdresser, rubbing the lather into my scalp. “Then you’re sure to hit it right. I got a claim out to Stein’s, and they’re striking oil all around. When they find it on my claim,”--(it is always “when,” never “if”)--I’m going to have a rope of pearls to my waist, and a Colonial Adobe house,--twenty rooms and a dance hall.” We left the little town, hideous in its barrenness and dreaming of its future, the waitresses chewing the inevitable toothpick, the two motion picture houses, the sandstorms, and the railway with its transcontinental standards, and hastened through to Arizona, leaving a more thorough inspection of New Mexico for spring. At the garage, we had one word of advice from a weather beaten old-timer, of whom we inquired as to roads. “The w’ust trouble ye’ll have in a prohibition state is tire trouble.” “Why should prohibition affect our tires?” “Dead soldiers.” “Dead soldiers?” “Empty whiskey bottles.” When we looked back half a mile down the road, he was still laughing at his wit. What would have happened if the really good one about our being a long way from home had occurred to him I cannot picture. Two routes offered for Tucson; the short cut through Lordsburg and Willcox, and the longer way by Douglas and the Mexican border. When we inquired which route would have more interesting scenery, we had met invariably with a stare and a laugh. “Not much _scenery_, wherever you go,--sand and cactus! Just as much on one road as another.”