Now there had been some little rumor of dissatisfaction among the relatives and friends of Limping Joe. They felt he should be tried by the Agent, quite as one who had purloined a sheep, and they expected that he would receive a mild type of punishment. Gossip had it that they would oppose his being removed from the Desert.
“I’ll go with you to the Reservation line,” I said to the [[293]]sheriff, “and this side of it, they will have to take him away from me.”
“Very good,” replied the officer, “because I wouldn’t fight for him.”
And I made up my mind that neither would I.
We started with the stars still bright in the sky, three o’clock of a morning, to cover the thirty-five miles to the line. The sheriff and deputy rode in a buckboard, the prisoner with them. An Indian boy drove my buggy, and I sat with a gun on the seat. Nothing happened. We did not see a Navajo on the trip. After lunching at the line, we parted with the officers, and prepared to return that same day. Seventy miles for the team would be a hard drive and would bring us in late at night; but this is in the day’s work too.
All that afternoon the horses jogged homeward. The prisoner off my hands, I dropped the gun into a bag under the seat. It was getting on to dark when the team began wearily climbing the last long rise that separated us from the drop down into Keams Cañon. There was a fringe of cedars at the top, black as spectres against a dull red sky. The horses plodded nearer and nearer to the crest of the ridge. One could see the branches of the old trees now, as if etched on the sky’s plate.
Then came a call, a Navajo cry. My boy pulled in the team with a sudden wrench. He had been watching the edge of the hill. And from the trees four or five men stepped quickly into the road. I made a swift clutch on the seat for the gun, and then realized that it could not be there. The bag had slipped back into the boot, and was mixed with halters, nose-bags, and the clutter of a desert buggy. There was a moment—it seemed a week—of tense chilliness, while they lingered in the dusk, as if [[294]]waiting for us. One cannot wheel a buggy in a desert road. It was either stop or go on. Then they crossed into the cedars, and we heard them moving off, talking in Navajo. One began to sing. My Indian boy laughed as if relieved.
“The miners,” he said.
And sure enough, they were my own coal-working gang that had quit the drift at five o’clock and had reached that point on their way home. But I had thought, and so had my driver, that friends of Limping Joe were about to greet us. It was just the right time in the evening, and just the right color in the sombre landscape; and they had stepped from the trees, half-waiting, in just that manner.
