n change wonderfully in sixty minutes. As we rode out toward
the Rio Grande, the yellow sands, the gray gramma grass, the purple
sage, the tall green cliffs, and, high above, the gleaming snow-crowned
peaks, took on a beauty never worn for me before. Why should a hope
spring up within me that would die as other hopes had died? But back of
all my thought was the longing to help Beverly, and a faith in Aunty
Boone's weird, prophetic grip on things unseen. He had just "gone out"
to her--why not to all of us? I could not understand Little Blue
Flower's part in this tragedy, so I let it alone.

A day out from Santa Fe we were joined by the little squad of cavalrymen
with whom we had parted company back at the Fort Bent camping-place.
With these we had little cause to dread personal danger. The Apache band
was a small, vicious gang that could do much harm to the Hopis, but it
seemed nothing for us to fear.

Our care was to reach Beverly before the Hopis should rise up against
Little Blue Flower, or the band led by Santan should fall upon them.
Father Josef had sent a runner on to tell them of our coming and to warn
them of the Apache raid. But runners sometimes come to grief.

It is easy enough now to sleep most of the hours away across the and
lands that lie between the Rockies and the Coast Range mountains, where
the great "through limiteds," swinging down their long trail of steel,
sweep farther in one day than we crept in two long, weary weeks in that
October fifty years ago. Only Father Josef's unerring Indian accuracy
brought us through.

We crawled up rugged mountain trails and skirted the rims of dizzy
chasms; we wound through canons, with only narrow streams for paths,
between sheer walls of rock; we pitched our camp at the bases of great,
red sand stone mesas, barren of life; we followed long, yellow ways over
stretches of unending plain; we wandered in the painted-desert lands,
where all the colors God has made bewilder with their beauty, in the
barest, dreariest, most unlovely bit of unfinished world that our great
continent holds; the lands forgotten, maybe, when, in Creation's busy
week, the evening and the morning were the sixth day, and the Great
Builder looked on His work and called it good.

We found the Hopi trails, but not the Hopi clan that we were seeking. We
found Apache trails behind them, but only dimly marked, as if they blew
one moccasin track full of sand before they made another.

The Octobe