“I heard his singing.”

“No, it wasn’t a song; the Navajo never sings in the morning.  What you heard was his morning prayer, a chant, a religious and solemn ritual to the break of day.  Emett says it is a custom of the desert tribe.  You remember how we saw the Mokis sitting on the roofs of their little adobe huts in the gray of the morning.  They always greet the sun in that way.  The Navajos chant.”

It certainly was worth remembering, I thought, and mentally observed that I would wake up thereafter and listen to the Indian.

“Good luck and bad!” went on Jones.  “Snow is what we want, but now we can’t find the scent of our lion of last night.”

Low growls and snarls attracted me.  Both our captives presented sorry spectacles; they were wet, dirty, bedraggled.  Emett had chopped down a small pine, the branches of which he was using to make shelter for the lions.  While I looked on Tom tore his to pieces several times, but the lioness crawled under hers and began licking her chops.  At length Tom, seeing that Emett meant no underhand trick, backed out of the drizzling snow and lay down.

Emett had already constructed a shack for the hounds.  It was a way of his to think of everything.  He had the most extraordinary ability.  A stroke of his axe, a twist of his great hands, a turn of this or that made camp a more comfortable place.  And if something, no matter what, got out of order or broken, there was Emett to show what it was to be a man of the desert.  It had been my good fortune to see many able men on the trail and round the camp-fire, but not one of them even approached Emett’s class.  When I said a word to him about his knack with things, his reply was illuminating:  “I’m fifty-eight, and four out of every five nights of my life I have slept away from home on the ground.”

“Chineago!” called Jim, who had begun with all of us to assimilate a little of the Navajo’s language.

Whereupon we fell to eating with appetite unknown to any save hunters.  Somehow the Indian had gravitated to me at meal times, and now he sat cross-legged beside me, holding out his plate and looking as hungry as Moze.  At first he had always asked for the same kind of food that I happened to have on my own plate.  When I had finished and had no desire to eat more, he gave up his faculty of imitation and asked for anything he could get.  The Navajo had a marvelous appetite.  He liked sweet things, sugar best of all.  It was a fatal error to let him get his hands on a can of fruit.  Although he inspired Jones with disgust and Jim with worse, he was a source of unfailing pleasure to me.  He called me “Mista Gay” and he pronounced the words haltingly in low voice and with unmistakable respect.

“What’s on for today?” queried Emett.

“I guess we may as well hang around camp and rest the hounds,” replied Jones.  “I did intend to go after the lion that killed the deer, but this snow has taken away the scent.”