Navajo whose _hogan_ was in
that direction, and who had promised to put me on my trail.

He was a fine, athletic youth of pleasant countenance, mounted upon a
spotted pony and wearing a shirt of purple calico. With a belt of silver
disks around his waist and a fillet of green cloth binding his glossy
black hair, he was distinctly and delightfully colorful.

Our way rose at once to the level of a majestic plateau, sparsely set
with pines and cedars, a barren land from which the grass and shrubs had
long since been cropped by swarms of sheep and goats. Nevertheless, it
was lovely to the eye, and as we rode forward we came upon a party of
Navajo girls gathering pinon nuts, laughing and singing in happy
abandon, untroubled by the white man's world. They greeted my guide with
jests, but became very grave as he pointed out a fresh bear-track in the
dust of the trail.

"Heap bears," he said to me. "Injun no kill bears. Bears big medicine,"
and as we rode away he laughed back at the panic-stricken girls, who
were hurriedly collecting their nuts in order to flee the spot.

At last my guide halted. "I go here," he signed with graceful hand. "You
keep trail; bimeby you come deep valley--stream. On left white man's
house. You stop there." All of which was as plain as if in spoken words.

As I rode on alone, the peace, the poetry, the suggestive charm of that
silent, lonely, radiant land took hold upon me with compelling power.
Here in the midst of busy, commonplace America it lay, a section of the
Polished Stone Age, retaining the most distinctive customs, songs and
dances of the past. Here was a people going about its immemorial
pursuits, undisturbed by the railway and the telephone. Its shepherds,
like the Hittites, who wandered down from the hills upon the city of
Babylon two thousand years before the Christian Era, were patriarchal
and pastoral. They asked but a tent, a piece of goat's flesh, and a cool
spring.

Late in the afternoon (I loitered luxuriously) I came to the summit of a
long ridge which overlooked a broad, curving valley, at the far-away
western rim of which a slender line of water gleamed. How beautiful it
all was, but how empty! No furrow, no hut, no hint of human habitation
appeared, a land which must ever be lonely, for it is without rains, and
barren of streams for irrigation.

An hour later I rode up to the door of a long, low, mud-walled building,
and was met by the trader, a bush-bearded, middle-age