out her
own business. When she came back, behold, the little lady had vanished.
After a long time, the maid reported her absence to the Ranger Office,
and a search was organized. Soon after the rangers had set out to look
for her, an automobile traveling from Flagstaff reported they had met a
thinly dressed woman walking swiftly out into the desert. She had
refused to answer when they spoke to her, and they were afraid she was
not responsible for her actions.

Ranger Winess, the Chief, and I climbed into the ever-ready Ford and
took up the trail. A heavy storm was gathering and the wind cut like a
knife. For several miles we saw nothing; then we saw her tracks in the
muddy road where the sun had thawed the frozen ground earlier in the
day. After a while great flakes of snow came down, and we lost all
trace. Backtracking ourselves, we found where she had left the road and
had hidden behind a big rock while we had passed. For an hour, through
the falling snow, with night closing around us, we circled and searched,
keeping in touch with each other by calling back and forth continually.
It would have been easy enough for the rangers to have lost me, for I
had no idea what direction I was moving in. We were about to give up and
go back to Headquarters for men and lights when Ranger Winess stumbled
over her as she crouched behind a log. She would have frozen to death in
a very short time, and her coyote-picked bones would probably never have
been discovered. She insisted she knew what she was about, and we had
literally to lift her into the car and take her back to El Tovar.

Whether the Canyon disorganized their judgment or whether they were
equally silly at home I cannot tell, but certainly the two New England
school teachers who tried horseback-riding for the first time, well--! I
was mixing pie crust when the sound of thundering hoofbeats down through
the woods took me to the door. Just at my porch some men were digging a
deep ditch for plumbing. Two big black horses, a woman hanging around
the neck of each, came galloping down on us, and as the foremost one
gathered himself to leap the ditch, his fainting rider relaxed and fell
right into the arms of a young Mormon workman. He carried her into my
house, and I, not being entirely satisfied with the genuineness of the
prolonged swoon, dismissed the workman and dashed the ice-cold pie crust
water in her face. She "came to" speedily. Her companion arrived about
that time an