Our guide directed us to a sheltered angle of the mesa where, among boulders and sand-drifts, we found the one unperished gift of the padres, delicious peaches, not so [[93]]large as California fruit, but having all the flavor and quality of that grown in Maryland and Delaware. We bargained with a smiling Hopi, and loaded.
And then, like all wise travelers in the Desert, we started to make “a long step on the road” while the sun was high; we camped that night in the greasewood, with well-smoked jack-rabbit for supper, and trundled into the Agency next evening, tired and hungry, to be received with coldness and suspicion. Our offering of peaches did not discount this bitterness. So small a thing as the erratic flight of a confused mammal may thus strain friendship and affect the most sincere labors. [[94]]
IX
THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF CHIEFS
“You’ll have charge of the district till my successor comes. I wish they would appoint you permanently; you know the folk. I suppose it will be Bullows, though. Good man, but too weak for frontier work; and he doesn’t understand the priests.… Call the Khusru Kheyl men up; I’ll hold my last public audience.”—Kipling: “The Head of the District.”
A year drifted by in this fashion. The November-December days were glorious. At a time when the effete East was slopping about in goloshes, and taking cold and quinine, and sniffling and having sick-leave, and generally hurrying toward the grave, we were reveling in sunshine.
January and February brought real crimping winter nights. Spring came in early March, and quickly the cottonwoods of the river-bank were all greening again. Then suddenly, as if in a flare of anger, the springtime wind cried its challenge to the moisture of the sand, and began driving everything that was loose before it. Then too, suddenly something happened: the Chief resigned.
A matter like this brings a dramatic pause to those in isolated places. Something of unexplained dread crept into everyone, from the Indian lad who curried the horses to the chief Nultsose. A little company of people, knowing each other thoroughly and marooned in a sense, would lose the Skipper, the Old Man, the Chief who had attended [[95]]to most of their routine thinking, and made decisions, and was responsible, and caused them generally to exist comfortably whether they were capable of it or not.
Who would succeed him?