A long pause, “You want to stay in Arizona?” “Yes.” “But California is only ninety miles away.” “But we like Arizona better.” Wounded incredulity. “Oh, you can’t. You’ve got sand and cactus here,--just a blamed desert. And look at California, the garden spot of the world. Roads like boulevards, scenery, live towns, everything you’ve got in the East, and a _climate_! Now, I tell you. Here’s what you do. I know California like a book, born there, thank God. You let me plan your route. You go to San Diego, work up the coast, see the Missions, Los Angeles, San Francisco,--say, that’s a _town_,--and then up to Seattle. You’ll have good roads all the way.” “Yes, but we were planning an entirely different trip. Arizona and New Mexico, the Rainbow Bridge, then north to Yellowstone and Glacier Park.” “Well, it’s lucky I saw you in time. You go straight to Needles,--you can’t miss the road, marked all the way. Good-by and good luck. You’ll like California.” Like Jacob with the angel they wrestled with us and would not let us go. After several such encounters, we learned to recognize the Native Son at sight, and when he opened with “Going to California?” we would reply, with the courage of our mendacity, “Just left.” It saved us hours daily. CHAPTER IX TWENTY PER CENT GRADES, FORTY PER CENT VANILLA. Complications arose when we reached Tucson. We planned to see endless places but most of them, at an altitude of a half mile to a mile and a half, could be reached only by roads still under ten feet of snow. The district ridged by the White Mountains was completely cut off, its unbridged rivers flooded, and its few highways covered by snow-drifts thrice the height of a man. The same conditions prevailed from Flagstaff to Winslow, and while Southern Arizona picked oranges and basked in the sun, the Grand Canyon was in the grip of winter. It became necessary, therefore, to find a ranch in which to hibernate for a month, till Arizona highways became less like the trains in the time table Beatrice Hereford describes, where “those that start don’t get there, and those that get there don’t start.” Tucson being apparently devoid of “dude” ranches, we decided to move on to the center of the state until we found what we sought. The shorter and more obvious route by the Old Spanish Trail, through Florence to Chandler and Phoenix, we discarded for the “new state highway” to Winkleman and Globe, thence over the Apache Trail to the Roosevelt Dam, and Chandler. Globe maintains all contact with the world by the Apache Trail: in the huge, irregular quadrilateral between Globe and Phoenix, through which the Mescal and Pinal ranges stray, there is no other road. The difficulty of travel in Arizona is not that the state has no roads, as has been unjustly claimed, but that the roads make no pretense of linking together the widely scattered towns.