hanting?" asked Jones, who sat with his horny
hands to the blaze.

"I heard his singing."

"No, it wasn't a song; the Navajo never sings in the morning. What you
heard was his morning prayer, a chant, a religious and solemn ritual
to the break of day. Emett says it is a custom of the desert tribe.
You remember how we saw the Mokis sitting on the roofs of their little
adobe huts in the gray of the morning. They always greet the sun in
that way. The Navajos chant."

It certainly was worth remembering, I thought, and mentally observed
that I would wake up thereafter and listen to the Indian.

"Good luck and bad!" went on Jones. "Snow is what we want, but now we
can't find the scent of our lion of last night."

Low growls and snarls attracted me. Both our captives presented sorry
spectacles; they were wet, dirty, bedraggled. Emett had chopped down a
small pine, the branches of which he was using to make shelter for the
lions. While I looked on Tom tore his to pieces several times, but the
lioness crawled under hers and began licking her chops. At length
Tom, seeing that Emett meant no underhand trick, backed out of the
drizzling snow and lay down.

Emett had already constructed a shack for the hounds. It was a way of
his to think of everything. He had the most extraordinary ability. A
stroke of his axe, a twist of his great hands, a turn of this or that
made camp a more comfortable place. And if something, no matter what,
got out of order or broken, there was Emett to show what it was to be
a man of the desert. It had been my good fortune to see many able
men on the trail and round the camp-fire, but not one of them even
approached Emett's class. When I said a word to him about his knack
with things, his reply was illuminating: "I'm fifty-eight, and four
out of every five nights of my life I have slept away from home on the
ground."

"_Chineago!_" called Jim, who had begun with all of us to assimilate a
little of the Navajo's language.

Whereupon we fell to eating with appetite unknown to any save hunters.
Somehow the Indian had gravitated to me at meal times, and now he sat
cross-legged beside me, holding out his plate and looking as hungry as
Moze. At first he had always asked for the same kind of food that
I happened to have on my own plate. When I had finished and had no
desire to eat more, he gave up his faculty of imitation and asked for
anything he could get. The Navajo had a marvelous appetite. He liked
s