The field matron was alarmed, but she did not leave as directed. She
waited until they had gone away, and then slipped across the
half-cleared desert space to the school principal’s home. He promptly
saddled a horse and came into the Agency that night. There were no
telephones across the Desert then. Next day he returned with definite
instructions.
It is not wise to permit Indians of an isolated place to indulge
themselves in temper of this kind. One bluff succeeds another, until
finally a mistake in handling causes a flare-up that is not easy to
control, and one is not thanked in Washington for fiascos. I have
pointed out how quickly Washington moves itself to aid when there is
revolt.
A capable field-matron or field-nurse is a good angel among such
people. She supplements daily the work of the visiting physician,
dispensing simple remedies according to his direction; she is
foster-mother to the little children of the camps and to the girls who
return from the schools. All social ills have her attention. She
maintains a bathhouse and laundry for the village people, and a
sewing-room for the women. In times of epidemic, these field matrons
perform extraordinary labors, and have been like soldiers when facing
contagious disease. With one other, Miss Mary Y. Rodger at the First
Mesa, Miss Abbott of Hotevilla ranked as the best in the Service; and
having ordered her to remain on that station, I determined that she
should live at the pueblo of Hotevilla in peace, if every one of the
ten-thousand sacred traditions reaching straight back to the Underworld
went by the board.
It is necessary first to catch your rabbit.
Whenever wanted and diligently sought for, Youkeoma was somewhere else,
and an unknown somewhere. While it was said that he and the other old
men spent their time in the kivas, I had failed to find them there.
Like the coyote that scents gun-oil, he smelt business from afar; and
this time it was business, and I wanted him.
Summoning the Indian police, I dispatched them under two white officers
to attend a Navajo dance in a distant cañon, forty miles east of the
Agency. Hotevilla was directly west from the Agency and about the same
distance removed. Having placed eighty miles between my police and the
scene of action, I informed my office force that I intended visiting
the railroad town on business. This would take me eighty miles to the
south. Others of the white men were sent to work at different range
points. No one suspected a Hotevilla mission. We went our several ways.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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