HE WAS A REGULAR MOVING PICTURE COWBOY AND GAVE GENERAL SATISFACTION
The young woman who presides over the dining room met him at the door. In the cool, clarified accents of a Wellesley graduate, which she is, she invited him to have on his things if he didn't mind. She also offered to take care of his hardware for him while he was eating. He consented to put his coat back on, but he clung to his weapons—there was no telling when the Indians might start an uprising. Probably at the moment it would have deeply pained him to learn that the only Indian uprising reported in these parts in the last forty years was a carbuncle on the back of the neck of Uncle Hopi Hooligan, the gentle copper-colored floorwalker of the white-goods counter in the Hopi House, adjacent to the hotel!
However, he stayed on long enough to discover that even this far west ordinary human garments make a most excellent protective covering for the stranger. Many of the tourists do not do this. They arrive in the morning, take a hurried look at the Cañon, mail a few postal cards, buy a Navajo blanket or two and are out again that night. Yet they could stay on for a month and make every hour count. To begin with, there is the Cañon, worth a week of anybody's undivided attention. Within easy reach are the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forests—thousands of acres of trees turned to solid agate. If these things were in Europe they would be studded thick with hotels and Americans by the thousand would flock across the seas to look at them. There are cliff-dwellers' ruins older than ancient Babylon and much less expensive.
The reservations of the Hopis and the Navajos, most distinctive of all the Southern tribes, are handy, while all about stretches a big Government reserve full of natural wonders and unnatural ones, too—everything on earth except a Lover's Leap. There are unexcelled facilities for Lover's Leaps, too—thousands of appropriate places are within easy walking distance of the hotel; but no lover ever yet cared to leap where he would have to drop five or six thousand feet before he landed. He'd be such a mussy lover; no satisfaction to himself then—or to the undertaker, either.
However, as I was saying, most of the tourists run in on the morning train and out again on the evening train. To this breed belonged a youth who dropped in during our stay; I think he must have followed the crowd in. As he came out from breakfast I chanced to be standing on the side veranda and I presume he mistook me for one of the hired help. This mistake has occurred before when I was stopping at hotels.
"My friend," he said to me in the patronizing voice of an experienced traveler, "is there anything interesting to see round here at this time of day?"
Either he had not heard there was a Grand Cañon going on regularly in that vicinity or he may have thought it was open only for matinees and evenings. So I took him by the hand and led him over to the curio store and let him look at the Mexican drawnwork. It seemed to satisfy him, too—until by chance he glanced out of a window and discovered that the Cañon was in the nature of a continuous performance.