The evening before resuming our march Captain Bayard informed me that
there was an emigrant family camped half a mile to the west of Fort
Wingate, which had been awaiting our arrival in order to travel to
Arizona under our protection. He told me to assign the family a place
in the train.
I went to their camp, and found it located in a grove of cottonwoods a
short distance out, on the Arizona trail. Mr. Arnold, the head of the
family, never ceased his occupation while I was talking to him. He was
constructing a camp-table and benches of some packing-boxes he had
procured from the post trader. He was a tall, well-proportioned man,
of dark complexion and regular features, with black, unkempt hair and
restless brown eyes. He was clothed in a faded and stained butternut
suit of flannel, consisting of a loose frock and baggy trousers, the
legs of the trousers being tucked into the tops of road-worn boots.
His hat was a battered and frayed broad-brimmed felt. Mrs. Arnold sat
on a stool superintending the work, bowed forward, her elbows on her
knees, holding a long-stemmed cob-pipe to her lips with her left hand,
removing it at the end of each inspiration to emit the smoke, which
curled slowly above her thin upper lip and thin, aquiline nose.
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