1858.] Friday the 13th, the next day, was my birthday and Mrs.
Thompson, who was always striving to do something to make
our circumstances pleasant, prepared a large peach pie with her own
hands in celebration. The Major and Jones having come in the night
before, we passed most of the time that day in a large tent eating
melons, the Major acting
as carver of the fruit. When we had eaten a watermelon
he would
declare that
he thought muskmelon far better. We all agreed. He would cut one only
to find when we had eaten it that we had changed our minds and wanted
watermelon, which see-saw opinions we kept up till all the melons were
gone. It would be impossible for any one who had not had our canyon
fare to
appreciate the exhilarating effect
of this fresh fruit. My leg, which had developed the pain coming up the
Kanab Canyon, now swelled till it was almost the same size throughout
and any pressure made
an imprint as in a piece of putty. No one
knew what to make of it. I rode over to Johnson's, that person being
the nearest to a doctor of any one in the country, though the Mormons
do not much believe in medicines, and he gave me a liniment to apply.
This did no good. In a few days the swelling disappeared except where
the spot of keen
pain was, and there a lump was left half as large as a man's fist, with
two small red spots in the middle of it. I now concluded that these
spots marked the bite of a tarantula that must have
gotten in my blankets at Shower-Bath Spring. Suppuration set in at the
spots where the flesh turned black and all the men said it was a
bad-looking wound. They thought I would lose my
leg. I concluded to poultice it to draw out any poison that remained,
and kept bread-and-milk applied continuously. After a while it seemed
to have a tendency to heal. We ran the base line up through Kanab and
at the head of it pitched
a small observatory tent over a st
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