Historically speaking, Ague’s pièce de resistance is Prestcott’s Hotel, built in 1882, and named after the prospector and founder of the town, Adam Prestcott. Originally, the place consisted of twenty-five cabins and seventy people and its very first property lot sold for the princely sum of $3.50. Ague sprang up on the luck of a group of miners to whom every wash in the area had brought new riches. Right now the town was struggling to claim its lawful place as a site of historical interest, which was tough considering it boasted only one famous gun battle – and that a dubious one – between two warring prospectors who had discovered a bonanza strike at more or less the same time but were both so geographically inept they failed ever to find it again. All this learned from the two girls behind Prestcott’s big oak bar reception, Candy and Sharleen, who wear white lace aprons over neat black skirts and who virtually weep with gratitude when I ask whether Emmy and Jack can use the loo – or restroom, as they politely inform us it’s called. The interior of the hotel is shabby Victoriana with a faded plum carpet, and the whole place has the faintest whiff of school cabbage dinners to it. Brass keys to the bedrooms hang on hooks in an old mail-sorting box but every single one of them appears to be present and accounted for.

‘Quietest little place you ever saw this time of year,’ the girls sigh, bringing out a plate of shortbread for the children to gnaw on. But according to Sharleen, in the spring when the desert bursts into bloom, and again in late fall after the sun has ceased pounding the earth with quite such ferocious intensity, people arrive from all over the United States, pop their parents into one of the innumerable retirement homes in Phoenix then celebrate their new-found freedom by touring the old mining towns or visiting Ague and taking part in one of the mock-up Doc Holliday,/ Tombstone-style gun battles staged there daily.

‘Oh yeah, it’s sure rip roarin’ those times,’ she says wistfully.