She was a prickly one as I guess you might suppose, much as Yuma, much as the desert; where California had yielded the desert merely roared with heat, heat, and more heat, as the sun thrust up into the sky so endlessly high and so blindingly blue one's retinas pulsated rays of indigo and gold indoors.

I believe those were the colors she wore, but then again I only saw her in that dark and horrible little cabin, pitch black in the blinding day and, therein, therein...None of California's dainty meadow flowers would have lived a moment next to Saguara! California, which appealed to any man and yielded up her virtues to any man who asininely stumbled onto them! Yuma made a man pay. And those were the only ways my desert flower knew...

Perhaps she was a quarter Indian, perhaps she was a quarter Spanish, and sure there was some French in there, too, and who can say what else, but I am sure the devil Himself had gotten a piece of her, too!

Now, Dear Reader, what would you like to hear? What do you think it was that I heard in Yuma that pulled me back again and again and again, that took me away from every commitment I had known, every California milestone for which I had striven for over a decade? What do you suppose it was?

That she told me that she me?

That only I would do?

Of course she did. And my first wife would never have what I made her do as she said it to me! How I made her beg! My former sister-in-law would have fainted dead away, saving me years of anguish and nearly a decade of timidity!

In Yuma, I found a certain cactus flower, the most fragrant of blossoms beneath the most remarkably flexible of cactus spines. No matter how I tried to break it, that spine would always bend, even—perversely, and decidedly perverted it was—beyond my insatiable want or will!

No, this was not pliant, easygoing California! Yuma had to be whipped and tamed! Anyone could be made to sigh at the obvious beauty of California, but Yuma had to be won! Yuma was a young man's game—California was there for pathetically easy plucking! I craved, shall we say, an acquired taste...