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Show Flying -91 and disintegrate like the flywheel on a dragster and fling pieces of red-hot gearmetal through my right leg. I was wounded in the Mojave desert, sir, just east of the Salton Sea. And now I must walk with a cane and an artificial leg for the rest of my natural life. But it looks quite real, doesn't it? Could fool most anybody. Sergeant Sutter comes by, a little bow-legged and looking right at home. "Howdy, sarge," says John Henry. "Howdy," says the sergeant. "Ever'thing all right with you boys?" His western drawl is a little deeper out here, and the sound of phlegm not so evident. Tucson John, they call him. "Canteens all filled?" he says. "It's a long drive to Yuma. Desert all the ttfay. A man can get mighty thirsty out here. " Canteens filled, they roll on, at the head of the convoy now, setting the pace. A steady thirty-five miles an hour. It's a hundred and eighteen miles along the Gila River to Yuma. Through Sentinel, Dateland, Mohawk, Tacna, Welton, staying south of the river all the way. John Henry sits in back and watches the tangled peaks of the Superstitions get lower and lower on the horizon. With their heads torn off. There is evil out here in the vast spaces of the West, where Whitman never travelled and Whittier is only the name of a town. |