Thus many mishaps were
Shefford's fortune.

Many and many a mile he trailed his mustang, for Nack-yal never forgot
the Sagi, and always headed for it when he broke his hobbles. Shefford
accompanied an Indian teamster in to Durango with a wagon and four wild
mustangs. Upon the return, with a heavy load of supplies, accident put
Shefford in charge of the outfit. In despair he had to face the hardest
task that could have been given him--to take care of a crippled Indian,
catch, water, feed, harness, and drive four wild mustangs that did not
know him and tried to kill him at every turn, and to get that precious
load of supplies home to Kayenta. That he accomplished it proved to hint
the possibilities of a man, for both endurance and patience. From that
time he never gave up in the front of any duty.

In the absence of an available Indian he rode to Durango and back in
record time. Upon one occasion he was lost in a canyon for days, with no
food and little water. Upon another he went through a sand-storm in the
open desert, facing it for forty miles and keeping to the trail; When he
rode in to Kayenta that night the trader, in grim praise, said there
was no worse to endure. At Monticello Shefford stood off a band of
desperadoes, and this time Shefford experienced a strange, sickening
shock in the wounding of a man. Later he had other fights, but in none
of them did he know whether or not he had shed blood.

The heat of midsummer came, when the blistering sun shone, and a hot
blast blew across the sand, and the furious storms made floods in the
washes. Day and night Shefford was always in the open, and any one who
had ever known him in the past would have failed to recognize him now.

In the early fall, with Nas Ta Bega as companion, he set out to the
south of Kayenta upon long-neglected business of the trader. They
visited Red Lake, Blue Canyon, Keams Canyon, Oribi, the Moki villages,
Tuba, Moencopie, and Moen Ave. This trip took many weeks and gave
Shefford all the opportunity he wanted to study the Indians, and the
conditions nearer to the border of civilization. He learned the truth
about the Indians and the missionaries.

Upon the return trip he rode over the trail he had followed alone to
Red Lake and thence on to the Sagi, and it seemed that years had passed
since he first entered this wild region which had come to be home, years
that had molded him in the stern and fiery crucible of the desert.

X. STONEB