"Please lend her a comb and a nightgown," he begged.
"All right." I was used to anything by now. "Silk or flannel?"
"Well," he said thoughtfully. "She acts like red flannel but probably expects crêpe de chine."
I sent both over, and never saw either again.
My heart went out to a poor little lady, sent by heartless relatives, traveling with only a maid. She was not mentally able to care for herself and certainly should not have been allowed to visit Grand Canyon. However, she and the maid arrived, with other visitors, and the maid seated her charge on a bench near the Rim, then went away about her own business. When she came back, behold, the little lady had vanished. After a long time, the maid reported her absence to the Ranger Office, and a search was organized. Soon after the rangers had set out to look for her, an automobile traveling from Flagstaff reported they had met a thinly dressed woman walking swiftly out into the desert. She had refused to answer when they spoke to her, and they were afraid she was not responsible for her actions.
Ranger Winess, the Chief, and I climbed into the ever-ready Ford and took up the trail. A heavy storm was gathering and the wind cut like a knife. For several miles we saw nothing; then we saw her tracks in the muddy road where the sun had thawed the frozen ground earlier in the day. After a while great flakes of snow came down, and we lost all trace. Backtracking ourselves, we found where she had left the road and had hidden behind a big rock while we had passed. For an hour, through the falling snow, with night closing around us, we circled and searched, keeping in touch with each other by calling back and forth continually. It would have been easy enough for the rangers to have lost me, for I had no idea what direction I was moving in. We were about to give up and go back to Headquarters for men and lights when Ranger Winess stumbled over her as she crouched behind a log. She would have frozen to death in a very short time, and her coyote-picked bones would probably never have been discovered. She insisted she knew what she was about, and we had literally to lift her into the car and take her back to El Tovar.
Whether the Canyon disorganized their judgment or whether they were equally silly at home I cannot tell, but certainly the two New England school teachers who tried horseback-riding for the first time, well—! I was mixing pie crust when the sound of thundering hoofbeats down through the woods took me to the door. Just at my porch some men were digging a deep ditch for plumbing. Two big black horses, a woman hanging around the neck of each, came galloping down on us, and as the foremost one gathered himself to leap the ditch, his fainting rider relaxed and fell right into the arms of a young Mormon workman. He carried her into my house, and I, not being entirely satisfied with the genuineness of the prolonged swoon, dismissed the workman and dashed the ice-cold pie crust water in her face. She "came to" speedily. Her companion arrived about that time and admitted that neither of them had ever been on a horse before, and not wanting to pay for the services of a guide they had claimed to be expert riders. It hadn't taken the horses long to find out how expert their riders were, and they had taken matters into their own hands, or perhaps it might be better to say they had taken the bits in their teeth and started for their stable.
The girl on the leading horse said she had been looking for quite a while for a suitable place to fall, and when she saw the Mormon she knew that was her chance!
It wasn't always the humans that got into trouble, either. I remember a beautiful collie dog that was being given an airing along the Rim. He suddenly lost his head, dashed over the low wall, and leaped to his death a thousand feet below. It took an Indian half a day of arduous climbing around fissures and bluffs to reach him and return him to his distracted owners for burial. They could not bear to leave the Canyon until they knew he was not lying injured and suffering on a ledge somewhere.