[THE NAVAJO TURQUOISE RING]
By permission The Argonaut, San Francisco, Cal.
"I tell you, Miss Nell, it's not safe for you to ride over the range so much all alone. That Navajo's plumb crazy about you now, and he's liable to do you some mischief."
The speaker, a handsome, blue-eyed young fellow, clad in the rough garb of a cowboy, with broad sombrero, "chaparejos," his buckskin gloves thrust through his cartridge belt, stood leaning against the door-post of a typical Arizona ranch house. In one hand he held the end of a long hair rope, the other end being fast to his pony, which, all saddled, stood pawing and restless, eager to be away on the range. Slung on the near side of the saddle was a Winchester carbine, for, between white and red thieves, the cowboys had to be ready for all sorts of emergencies, and besides, the big gray wolves were beginning to show up on the range, and a wolf scalp was worth twenty dollars at the county seat.
The person to whom these remarks were addressed stood idly switching her riding-habit with her "quirt," a handsome piece of cowboy work, over which one of her many admirers had spent hours by the light of a campfire plaiting and decorating it with "Turk's heads" and other fancy knots known to cowboy quirt-makers. She was all ready for a ride and waiting only for her pony to be brought up from the corral, where Juan, the Mexican, was saddling him.
There was a pleading, pathetic tone in the man's voice that spoke the lover, even had his eyes shown no sign of passion; but his words seemed to rouse all the perversity of her sex. Her red lips curled and her brown eyes snapped. "Oh, pshaw, Mr. Cameron, you're always worrying about some imaginary danger. Please return me my ring—that is, if you have finished examining it."
A red wave swept over Cameron's face, like the shadow of a cloud across the prairie on a bright day, and he stood for a full minute idly turning the ring in question upon the very tip of the little finger of his own sun-browned hand. It was a splendid specimen of the Navajo silversmith's art. Now, the Navajo Indians' blankets have made them famous, but they deserve quite as much fame for their cunning as workers in silver.
This ring was indeed a gem. It was wide, as most of their rings are, cut in two on the inner side so that it could be made larger or smaller by "springing" it to fit any finger, and in the top was set a turquoise as blue as a summer sky—a stone precious to the Navajos—that among the tribe would have bought twenty ponies, a hundred sheep, and squaws galore. Around the ring ran the most intricate and delicate carving, and the whole effect was at once unique and barbaric.