“What’s the trouble?” I asked him.
“There’s a man shot in the Wepo Wash—Navajo; and they’re holding a Hopi for it. Billa Chezzi says must kill him pronto. Come right away and stop it. Here’s a letter.”
The note he handed me had been hurriedly written by an Indian girl of the mesa, and she had been so filled with the necessity for my coming “to stop it” that she had failed to give all the facts. It appeared however that an unfortunate Hopi, held a prisoner by the Navajo of the North, was to be butchered by sundown; and the sun had gone down and was about to come up again.
I aroused the physician and the big stockman from their slumbers.
“We’ll start at daylight, so get ready.”
The stockman routed out the Navajo interpreter, and they began adjusting a Ford car, in the hope that it would hold together through a nervous experience.
Just at daybreak a range Navajo rode in with another note. This was from the redoubtable Ed, trading now in the Bakidbahotzne country of the central North, and who kept me advised from that distant station.
Billa Chezzi and his gang have a Hopi boy up here, and all last night they argued to kill him. I advised them to send for you. They are not in the best of humors. Seems that this Hopi boy shot a Navajo boy. Bring the doctor. The Navajo is not dead yet.
Now this looked a trifle better, but there was an ominous possibility in his last sentence. “The Navajo is not dead—yet.”
There were four of us in the car: the physician, the stockman, the Indian interpreter, and myself. Several [[314]]policemen clattered their way over the shorter trails, but I did not feel that they would help matters much. On reaching the First Mesa we learned that a Hopi lad named Lidge Palaquoto, the son of Pah-lah, a widow, and who was aged about fourteen years, had been out with sheep in the upper Wepo Wash. He had carried a .22 rabbit-gun. When he did not return at nightfall, search developed that he was in the hands of the Black Mountain Navajo. He had somehow and for some unknown reason shot a Navajo boy, about two years older than himself.