“What’s this I hear about the Chief offering you an inspectorship? That
would give you some travel too, and—”
“An inspectorship! Travel!” he snorted. “Why, good God, man! I am the
boss of the Switzerland of America. I wouldn’t trade my post for a seat
in the Cabinet.”
That is the way they talked, and a few of them undoubtedly meant it.
A large bulky man, with a face like a piece of granite, twisted a crude
silver ring on his finger as he extended a similar invitation in an
entirely different way. He was a slow-speaking fellow, of few words and
those of a definite, precise character.
“You’d like it,” he finished, sighing. “The Navajo country is a great
place—a great place—”
He seemed at loss for words to picture his meaning, and I know now why
language failed him.
Said a third, for whom I had unraveled the genealogy of a much
intermarried Indian family, and who was grateful:—
“Why, you’re just the lad for me. All you’ll have to do is ride fences,
armed with a hammer and a pocketful of staples” (I think he really said
“steeples,”) “—and there’s quarters for you; twelve hundred a year too.
You’ll get a lot of dope for stories. That place fairly drips ’em. What
say? I can fix it with the Chief?”
After having had the courtesy to thank them one and all, I leaned back
in the swivel-chair and laughed. While they were present I
good-humoredly laughed with them, and later, at them. You see, in the
Office I was known as the Scribe, ever since that time when the boss of
Indian Territory had rushed in, mad as a hornet, waving a copy of
Harper’s Weekly, and declaring that the essential guts of an article
therein had been stolen from his confidential files. And while I had
purloined them with the Chief’s permission, I realized it was a fine
thing for me not to have lived in the Indian Territory.
While I might spend odd time writing stories of heroic unwashed
cowpunchers battling Dante-nosed cayuses across the vasty early-morning
range, with the frost nipping down the alkali dust, and a pale-rose
tone on the distant range of hills, I knew also that they did it for
forty dollars the month and grub off the wheel. I was then and am to
this day aware that cowmen give little thought to either the vasty
sweep of the broad spaces or to the rose tones. And I was perfectly
able to fake the western landscape, where a man’s a man an’ a’ that,
without removing myself more than five blocks from a café and a steak à
la Bordelaise. I had placed one hundred stories in New York, and a
hundred more on the stocks, without smelling an Indian camp or
subjecting myself to the grave and anxious possibility of getting—well,
inhabited, to say the least of it. I assumed that the dapper fellow was
more of a clerk than a ranger; that the slow-moving granite-faced
individual truly reflected the somber aridity of his monotonous desert;
and the fact that the third had said “steeples” proved to me that I
could never respect him as chief.
“No!” I decided, with a grin. “The Borax mule-team couldn’t drag me
into that life.” And I too meant it.
But—I was brutally launched out of this effete complacency and pitched
into the great Navajo Desert country without disturbing a single mule.
I scrapped for money to purchase the once-despised “critters” to enable
my existence therein. And I have been proud of my mules since.
Without seeming to be missed by those to whom I had thought my going
would be tragedy, without causing a ripple among those few with whom I
found myself, the Wheel turned over, and the vast immutable Desert
received me with as much inscrutable kindness as it offers anyone. I
had prepared the chute myself, and having greased it thoroughly,
slipped and plunged down it, as has many a better man without sliding
any further than his grave.
“See the Chief, and get a berth in the West. Live out o’ doors, rough
it, live on milk and eggs, and don’t come home until I agree to it. You
are two leaps ahead of the lion, and you’ll beat him yet.”
It was the cruel frankness of friendship. I had romped the city streets
with the doctor, attended the same schools, appeared on the same stage
as promoter of histrionic wares; in short, he had been the leader of my
gang. I could recall the local excitement aroused by his first cane,
and had carried his messages to his first girl. He knew how many times
I had been thrashed, and had once turned the trick himself. There was
no need for professional bluff between us.
Next day, perhaps a trifle groggy, I got to my feet in a more
determined spirit, to prepare for the six-months’ battle. The Chief was
very kind.
“Why not take a superintendency?” he suggested. “There’s one vacant,
down in Rainbow Cañon. That’s the Grand Cañon country, you know.
Wonderful place, one of the rarest spots on earth.”
I thanked him for the confidence, knowing that Rainbow Cañon was no
place for an invalid. That Agency is nearly always vacant. New
superintendents negotiate the trail but twice—ignorantly, going in, and
wisely, coming out for ever. Even sure-footed mules have been known to
miscalculate at Suicide Corner, and it is claimed that the bones of one
such beast, entangled in the wires of his last burden,—a cottage
piano,—still furnish a mystic Æolian effect when the wind sweeps below
the place where he faltered. The last superintendent had spent
forty-eight hours in a tree, evading flood-waters that threatened to
carry him on a personally conducted tour through the Grand Cañon
itself. I had arranged his relief by telegraphing the nearest offices
adjacent to his tree, a mere matter of miles, up and down; and I had no
great confidence that anyone would so rapidly arrange mine in similar
circumstances. No! Rainbow Cañon sounded good, quite poetical, indeed;
but none of it for one who required rest and as little exercise as
possible.
So, in accord with my request and at my own valuation, based on my
inexperience, I was formally transferred as a clerk to an Indian Agency
that sits astride the Santa Fe trail—the modern trail connecting the
ancient city of Santa Fe with the Pacific, along which pioneers wended
in the forties.
One week later I had left Washington to make the trek of two thousand
five hundred miles to the Painted Desert and—to me—a most desolate
siding on the banks of the Little Colorado River in Arizona.