LITMIR.BIZ

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out we went Into the rain, carefully closing the door behind us, and down the trail we ran, splashing through little streamlets of water everywhere cascading down the steep mountain-side, our Hopi friend pausing to dance a few steps in the larger ones, and singing the while a quaint and lively little air that was very pleasant in our ears. And then, coming to the clearing, we raced across it, and at the cabin porch came to a sudden stand and stared at the open door — that we had carefully locked that morning — and at a litter of odds and ends upon the floor.

      Hannah ran to the corner of the cabin: “The bear hide is gone!” she shrieked.

      We joined her and stared at the empty frame; at the cut rope lacings strewing the ground.

      “Henry King has been here again! He is the one who has our bear hide, the mean deserter! Coward!” Hannah cried.

      I was so angry that I could n’t speak. I turned and led into the cabin, and we stared at the wreck of it: not a sack of our flour, corn meal, beans, rice, and other things remained in the open food chest. The bacon and ham sacks were gone; the table had been swept clean of the eatables we had left upon it. All of Hannah’s blankets had been taken, and her canvas bed cover. Her comb and brush and little mirror, too, and my box of 30-30 cartridges. I ran outside to my bunk and found that it had been stripped!

      ‘‘One man could n’t have packed off all our stuff; no, nor two: those I.W.W. firebugs have done this and Henry King brought them here,” I said when I went back inside.

      “One man could have loaded it all upon a horse,” said our Hopi friend.

      “Yes. But that deserter, those firebugs, are not using horses. Horses leave tracks; they can easily be trailed,” I said.

      “That is so. Those men would not use them. Well, what are you going to do?”

      “We have no food but the lunch that we put up; what can we do but go home?” cried Hannah.

      “That is the only thing for us to do. The rain has already washed out all tracks of the thieves, we can’t follow them, and we can’t stay here and starve,” I said.

      “What? Go home! Let those bad men get away with our bear hide? Oh, no! no! We must have it back from them. You have no food, you say ? Why, there is plenty of food up here: my old men have quite a lot of corn meal and pinole, and there are plenty of deer: every evening I see them grazing at the edge of the timber under the north end of the mountain,” our Hopi friend exclaimed, and, oh, how his eyes were flashing!

      “But if we have the food, what then? how can we get back the bear hide?” I asked.

      “Wait! Let my old men talk to you about that,” he answered. “They said something the other day — only a few words — they were busy with their prayers, but I’ll bring them here. You shall hear them!” And with that he was out of the door and splashing up the little clearing.

      Hannah proposed that we telephone the Supervisor what had happened to us, but I decided that we should not do so before hearing what the old Hopi men had to say. We had brought our lunch back with us from the lookout, and now each took a third of it, leaving the remainder for our friend. Soon after we finished eating — and the dry bread and bacon now sure tasted good — we heard the little party slopping their way to us across the clearing. Our friend led the old men up on to the tiny porch — where they dropped their various belongings, and then, old White Deer leading, they came inside, and one by one gravely shook hands with us.

      And then the leader said to us, our friend interpreting, of course:

      We are glad to shake hands with you, you two of good heart. We are glad to come into your house, now that we have brought the rain and are free to do as we please.”

      ‘‘We are very glad to have you here. But you must be wet through. Hang up your blankets along the wall to dry, and sit here before the stove,” I answered.

      ‘‘Yes. We will sit with you for a time,” the old man said; “but as to our blankets, we ourselves, we men weave them, and so tight that water does not go through them. We are dry enough.”

      They took seats then, two upon the food chest and the others upon boxes, and Hannah and I perched ourselves upon the bunk. No one spoke for some time. The rain continued to beat upon the iron roof. At last, quite to our surprise. White Deer arose and again shook sister’s hand and mine. He then stood off a little way, threw back his blanket, and said to us — a sentence or two at a time as the interpreter nodded to him to proceed:

      “Generous youth and girl: From day to day our young helper has told us of your troubles, but, busy with that we have come so far to do, we had no time for more than a few words together, now and then, about what we learned. It was with sad hearts that we looked out upon the great fires below, set by bad white men with intent to destroy this great forest, Rain God’s garden. Yes. These mountain slopes are his garden, these great trees his plantings, their fine growth the result of his plentiful waterings. When our long-ago fathers came here every spring to pray and sacrifice to Rain God, they would no more have destroyed one of these trees than they would have destroyed themselves. And so we feel about it, and have prayed that the bad fire-setters be themselves destroyed.

      “When our young helper told us that he was to have a share in the selling of the hide of the great bear that you killed, he made us very happy. We said to one another that the money he would get from that would be clean money, and enough, perhaps, for him to pay his way when he goes to ask the great white chiefs to free us, to ask that we be no longer slaves. And now that valuable bear hide is gone, gone with your food and your blankets, taken by these same destroyers of Rain God’s beautiful garden!

      ‘‘Can the hide, and your different things be recovered ? Perhaps they can. When our young helper told us that white seizer-men, and Apache seizers, were hunting day after day for the fire-setters, and could not find them, we did not say much, but we kept that in mind. Morning after morning when we came up out of the kiva and saw fresh fires, and still more fires burning, we said that the fire-setters were in hiding somewhere near them, and in a place where the blaze of their own fires, their cooking fires, could not be seen, nor they themselves be caught while they slept, as sleep they must, at times.

      “In our kivas out there in the desert, the old priests are ever instructing the new ones, not only in religion, but in the whole history of our people. So it is that we knew just how to come to this sacred mountain, knew the trail as well as though we had traveled it many times. And we know, just as well as though we had seen them, many places along this range of mountains that our people visited in the long ago. One of those places is a great cave; a cave so large, running so far into the mountain slope that, without a light, one could easily become lost in it and never find his way out. That cave is down there where those fires are burning. We believe that it is about halfway between the farthest east fire and the one farthest west. Now, perhaps you two know that cave?

      ‘‘Let me question you,” he went on. “North from here, and not far from the edge of the desert, is a long, double butte, bare on top; and west of it, and also near the desert, is a higher butte with a very sharp top. Is that not so?”

      “Yes. The one farthest west is Green’s Peak, the other is Poll Knoll.”

      “Good. We have our own names for them, but that does not matter now. I ask you: About halfway between those buttes is there not a small creek running out from the forest and ever being swallowed by the thirsty desert?”

      “There is. We call it Conaro Creek.”

      “And just after it runs out of the forest does it not go down over three broken ledges of rock quite a ways apart, the middle ledge much the highest of the three?”

      And when that had been interpreted to us, Hannah and I sure stared at one another, and at him: he had described the place exactly. We both cried out: ‘‘Three ledges are there!” —“The center ledge is the highest!”

      The old men all smiled, nodded to one another, and White Deer concluded: “At the foot of the center ledge, a short distance — a hundred steps — west of the

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