CHAPTER IV
TONTO BASIN
The start of a camping trip, the getting a big outfit together and
packed, and on the move, is always a difficult and laborsome job.
Nevertheless, for me the preparation and the actual getting under way
have always been matters of thrilling interest. This start of my hunt
in Arizona, September 24, 1918, was particularly momentous because I
had brought my boy Romer with me for his first trip into the wilds.
It may be that the boy was too young for such an undertaking. His
mother feared he would be injured; his teachers presaged his utter
ruin; his old nurse, with whom he waged war until he was free of her,
averred that the best it could do for him would be to show what kind
of stuff he was made of. His uncle R.C. was stoutly in favor of taking
him. I believe the balance fell in Romer's favor when I remembered
my own boyhood. As a youngster of three I had babbled of "bars an'
buffers," and woven fantastic and marvelous tales of fiction about my
imagined adventures--a habit, alas! I have never yet outgrown.
Anyway we only made six miles' travel on this September twenty-fourth,
and Romer was with us.
Indeed he was omnipresent. His keen, eager joy communicated itself to
me. Once he rode up alongside me and said: "Dad, this's great, but I'd
rather do like Buck Duane." The boy had read all of my books, in spite
of parents and teachers, and he knew them by heart, and invariably
liked the outlaws and gunmen best of all.
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