sufficiently alarmed to call upon their tribesmen for help. And that was
perfectly natural and sensible from their point of view.

Now, the Navajos are peaceable enough if you leave them strictly
alone and do not come snooping upon their reservation trying to arrest
somebody. But they don't like jails, and if you persist in trailing
their lawbreakers you are going to have trouble on your hands. The Happy
Family, with Luck and Applehead, had no intention whatever of molesting
the Navajos; but the Navajos did not know that, and they acted according
to their lights and their ideas of honorable warfare.

Roused to resistance in behalf of their fellows, they straightway
forsook their looms, where they wove rugs for tourists, and the silver
which they fashioned into odd bracelets and rings; and the flocks of
sheep whose wool they used in the rugs and they went upon a quiet,
crafty warpath against these persistent white men.

They stole their horses and started them well on the trail back to
Albuquerque--since it is just as well to keep within the white men's
law, if it may be done without suffering any great inconvenience. They
would have preferred to keep the horses, but they decided to start them
home and let them go. You could not call that stealing, and no one need
go to jail for it. They failed to realize that these horses might be so
thoroughly broken to camp ways that they would prefer the camp of the
Happy Family to a long trail that held only a memory of discomfort;
they did not know that every night these horses were given grain by the
camp-fire, and that they would remember it when feeding time came again.
So the horses, led by wise old Johnny, swung in a large circle when
their Indian drivers left them, and went back to their men.

Then the Navajos, finding that simple maneuver a failure--and too late
to prevent its failing without risk of being discovered and forced into
an open fight--got together and tried something else; something more
characteristically Indian and therefore more actively hostile. They rode
in haste that night to a point well out upon the fresh trail of their
fleeing tribesmen, where the tracks came out of a barren, lava-encrusted
hollow to softer soil beyond. They summoned their squaws and their
half-grown papooses armed with branches that had stiff twigs and
answered the purpose of brooms. With great care about leaving any
betraying tracks of their own until they were quite ready to leave