The Acting Commissioner shivered in his pajamas. It is cold at those altitudes, even on August nights; and when one is standing barefoot, you know, and being pressed for a warrant—he wavered into the wrong pew, for he said: “Ask Shelton about it.”
Now Shelton was the most determined Indian Agent that ever wielded authority in the lonely desert. He and a dozen other Agents were among my guests. He was that one with a chipped-granite face I had met in the Office long ago, and whose language had failed when he tried to describe the subtle beauty of his domain. Roosevelt called him one of the best Agents in the Service, “who has done more for the Navajo than any other living man.” He disciplined the criminal element among Indians, and protected all of them, good and bad, from exploitation. His Agency was a lovely garden wrested from a sterile immensity, where the Desert bloomed as a rose. Shelton is gone now. Only the Indians miss him. His place in the great Desert has not been filled. There are Nahtahnis and Nahtahnis. And I venture to say that the praise of Theodore Roosevelt, plus the few words I have written, are all the record shows for Shelton’s many years in that empire of the San Juan River, where the Ship Rock trims its great stone sails against the desert winds.
Shelton rolled out and sat on the edge of his bed. He listened.
“How far to your line?” he asked.
“Nine miles by the road I think he has taken. He’s [[254]]across the line long ago, unless the Jedito is running and has stopped him.”
“Do you need me?” he said. He was not a man to waste words.
“No. But there is an early train west. He may be off the reservation. What would you do?”
“Get him,” said Shelton, and went back to bed.
For it had been ordered that no moving-picture film of the Hopi Snake Dance should be made, unless by permit of the Secretary of the Interior; and it had been further decreed that such permission should be granted to representatives of State and National museums only. The Governor of Arizona had respected this order. The Commissioner had declined to request any modification of it. I was therefore anxious to find the fellow who had slipped in furtively, had procured a reservation permit by evasion, had been warned not to work, who had proposed a contract requiring the Secretary’s approval, and who had broken his word.
For a week I had been on my toes, so to speak. Two thousand tourists, threescore official guests, including a dozen observing Indian Agents and the Colonel and everything, had caused me to become a trifle peevish. The Dance was over; the tumult and the shouting had died, the captains and the kings were departing. And so was an insolent crank-operator with a valuable film. Too much is enough.