"One thing sure," remarked Frank aside to his chum, "he's been in touch with the whites a heap, or he wouldn't know how to talk as he does. But then, that isn't so queer. You know that these Moquis pick up a lot of good coin from the travelers who come and go at the Grand Canyon."
"Why, yes," Bob went on to say, "I've always heard that one of the sights of this wonderland was the snake dance of the Moquis. I read an account of it in a magazine once. It said that hundreds of people gathered from many quarters to be on hand and see it, because it occurs only once a year. Some of them were big guns in science, too."
"They're getting more and more interested in these Indians of the Southwest," Frank continued; "and trying all the time to find out just where they fit in the long-ago past. That's what made old Uncle Felix, who had already made a name for himself, give up his happy home, and hide all these months down here. He wants to learn the long-buried secrets of the past history of the Zunis, the Moquis, and other tribes that might have sprung from the old cliff builders."
"But what can we do with this fellow, Frank?"
"Oh! well, nothing much, I reckon," the other answered, carelessly. "He must have been plum locoed at seeing the sheriff, and hardly knew what he was doing when he set out to grab Buckskin. We'll just have to let him sleep here till morning, and then give him a bite of breakfast."
"Just as you say, Frank; you ought to know what's best," Bob hastened to declare. "Now I wonder what'll be the next thing on the programme? I hope we don't have the two men the sheriff is hunting, drop in to make us a call."
"Little danger of that now," Frank remarked reassuringly. "By this time they're well on their way to Flagstaff. Here, Havasupai, as you call yourself; we don't mean to do you any harm, even if you did play us a mean trick when you tried to steal a mount. Understand?"
The old Indian looked up at Frank through his masses of coarse black hair, just beginning to be streaked with gray.
"Not do any harm," he repeated, as though hardly able to grasp the meaning of the words Frank spoke; then his brown face lighted up with a grim smile. "White boys good; Havasupai glad him not take horse. Bad Indian! But not always that way; him carry speaking paper tell how make good," and he thumped his breast as he said this.
Again did Bob's eyes seek the face of his chum in a questioning manner. Frank, having been raised amid such scenes, could more readily understand what the Moqui meant when he referred to certain things which Bob had never heard mentioned before.