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 October days were dreams of loveliness, and dawn and sunset on the desert were indescribably beautiful.  But the nights were bitterly cold.  Eloise and Sister Gloria were native to the Southwest and they knew how to dress warmly for it.  Aunty Boone had never felt such chilling night breezes, but not one word of complaint came from her lips in all that journey.

One night we gathered into camp beneath the shelter of a little butte.  We had overtaken Father Josef’s Indian runner an hour before.  He had not found the Hopis yet, and so we held a council.

“The Hopi is ahead of us northwest,” the Indian declared.

“Is the Apache following?” Jondo asked.

The runner nodded.  “They have been pursued, but they have slipped away; the Apache goes north, they turn north-west.  They take the dry lands and the pine forests beyond; their last chance.  If they hold out till the Apache leaves, they will return safely.  You follow them, wait for them, or go back without them.  It is your choice.”

We turned toward the three women, one in the bloom of her young womanhood, one with the patient endurance of the nun, one black and strong and always unafraid.

“I do not want to leave Little Blue Flower in her hour of peril,” Eloise said.

“I can go where I am needed,” Sister Gloria declared.

“This is my land, I never know Africa was right out here.  I thought they was oceans on both sides of it.  I go where Bev’s gone out an then I come here and stay.  Whoo-ee!”

We smiled at her mistaken dream of her far African home, and, cheering one another on, when morning came we moved northwest.

Jondo rode beside me all that day, and we talked of many things.