"I'd give everything I have in this world, and all my chances for the next, to get a tub bath!" "It will be so refreshing just before supper," said Mrs.Maynadier, who was more conservative.
So the Indian, who had put on his dark blue waist-band (or sash), made from flannel, revelled out and twisted into strands of yarn, and which showed the supple muscles of his clean-cut thighs, and who had done up an extra high pompadour in white clay, and burnished his knife, which gleamed at his waist, ushered these Washington women into a small apartment adjoining the bath-room, and turned on the inky stream into the sarcophagus.
The Staff beauty looked at the black pool, and shuddered.

"Do you use it ?" said she.
"Occasionally," I equivocated.
"Does it hurt the complexion ?" she ventured.
"Jack thinks it excellent for that," I replied.
And then I left them, directing Charley to wait, and prepare the bath for the second victim.
By and by the beauty came out.

"Where is your mirror ?" cried she (for our appointments were primitive, and mirrors did not grow on bushes at Ehrenberg); "I fancy I look queer," she added, and, in truth, she did; for our water of the Styx did not seem to affiliate with the chemical properties of the numerous cosmetics used by her, more or less, all her life, but especially on the voyage, and her face had taken on a queer color, with peculiar spots here and there.
Fortunately my mirrors were neither large nor true, and she never really saw how she looked, but when she came back into the living-room, she laughed and said to Jack: "What kind of water did you say that was?
I never saw any just like it." "Oh! you have probably never been much to the sulphur springs," said he, with his most superior and crushing manner.
"Perhaps not," she replied, "but I thought I knew something about it; why, my entire body turned such a queer color." "Oh! it always does that," said this optimistic soldier man, "and that shows it is doing good." The Paymaster's wife joined us later.

I think she had profited by the beauty's experience, for she said but little.
The Quartermaster was happy; and what if his wife did not believe in that uncanny stream which flowed somewhere from out the infernal regions, underlying that wretched hamlet, he had succeeded in being a benefactor to two travellers at least! We had a merry supper: cold ham, chicken, and fresh biscuit, a plenty of good Cocomonga wine, sweet milk, which to be sure turned to curds as it stood on the table, some sort of preserves from a tin, and good coffee.
I gave them the best to be had in the desert--and at all events it was a change from the Chinaman's salt beef and peach pies, and they saw fresh table linen and shining silver, and accepted our simple hospitality in the spirit in which we gave it.
Alice Martin was much amused over Charley; and Charley could do nothing but gaze on her lovely features.

"Why on earth don't you put some clothes on him ?" laughed she, in her delightful way.
I explained to her that the Indian's fashion of wearing white men's clothes was not pleasing to the eye, and told her that she must cultivate her aesthetic sense, and in a short time she would be able to admire these copper-colored creatures of Nature as much as I did.
But I fear that a life spent mostly in a large city had cast fetters around her imagination, and that the life at Fort Whipple afterwards savored too much of civilization to loosen the bonds of her soul.