Friday the thirteenth, the date of our own exit from that picturesque and turbulent town, opened inauspiciously. A flat tire, incurred overnight, caused an hour’s delay at the start. While we breakfasted at the Copper Queen, it again lost courage, and we had no choice but to thump downhill to the garage, near the great Copper Queen mine which daily levels mountains and fills up valleys. But our spare tire was found to be locked, and the key was in one of our seven suitcases. All work ceased till by a miracle of memory we recalled that the key was in a coat pocket, the coat was in a suitcase, the suitcase in the bottom of the trunk,--but where was the trunk key? More delay while we both searched our overflowing handbags,--and nothing embarrasses a woman more than to have half a dozen men watch her futile dives into her handbag. At last it appeared, and in due time, when we had wrestled like born baggage-smashers with the heavy suitcases, opened the bottom one and found the key, repacked the suitcase, put it back, lifted the other four on top, locked the trunk, and replaced the other baggage, we unlocked the spare tire. It did not budge from the rim. Earlier that luckless morning, I had backed into an unexpected telegraph pole, jamming the spare tire braces out of shape. So the garage men went back and forth on futile errands, as garagemen will, picking tools up and dropping them again with an air of satisfied achievement. Finally a young Samson came to the rescue, bending the tire into place with his bare hands, and after that they took only an hour to change the tires. With the sun high in front of us, we drove through the smoke and fumes of the mines, past pretty suburbs, into the open plateau leading to Douglas. We expected to be in Deming that night. The mountains and canyons of yesterday subsided into a broad plain, with a poplar-bordered canal trickling prettily through it. At noon we sighted Douglas, a city of smoke-stacks simmering in a fog of coal gas. A once-good macadam road wound into an unsightly group of smelters and huge slag heaps,--the usual backdoor entrance of a Western town,--and suddenly reformed into a main street, imposing with buildings so new they looked ill at ease among the old-settler lunch shacks and ex-saloons. Side streets beginning bravely from the new electric light pillars, became disheartened at the second block, and were smothered in sand at the third. To crown a banal hobby with the height of banality, I have for years amused myself wherever I may be by collecting postcards of Main Street looking South, or North, depending on the location of the public library and the fire station. Every orthodox postcard artist begins with Main Street. An extra charm to Main Street looking South in Douglas lay in its crossing the border and fizzling out into Mexico. Each time we had skirted the border, Mexico had beckoned alluringly, tempting us to discover what lay behind her drop curtain of monotonous blue and brown.