This bridge, having a wooden floor, became my signal of traffic. A belated freight-team would rumble across it, telling of supplies; the weary stride of a buggy pair would herald that the doctor or the stockman had reached home and would soon report. Seldom did it announce anything after ten o’clock. Then the cañon was an enchanted place, bathed in summer moonlight or ghastly sheeted in the winter snow, quiet, sleeping. When a horseman crossed that bridge in the late night or early morning hours, it was either an Indian drifting homeward, belated, half asleep, or a messenger to the Agent. A swift driving canter, and I waited for the slipping of moccasins along a cement walk and the rattle of a quirt on my door; I was about to say, my shutters. Now and then the message would have a tragic possibility in it: the physician wanted, quickly; or the news of a plague among the people. One would expect the police to pack the most disturbing announcements; but, strange to relate, in the two cases bordering nearest tragedy the messengers were women. One, an employee of the field, came late at night to tell that Indians proposed to break quarantine and remove patients from a temporary hospital. This was during one of the plagues; and the Hopi suffer many, due to their congested and unsanitary mode of living. The mesa villages welcome every infection. A man should have borne this message, but the woman had slipped away as the one least likely to be missed, and round about the trails and roads, twenty-five miles, came for police. The reservation had no telephone at that time. The swift pace of the pony across the bridge aroused me. Next I heard rapid steps on the walk, then someone ascending the verandah steps. But for a wire screen, the front door stood open. “What is it?” I asked. No answer. “Who is that?” Silence. My hand slipped over to the automatic. Threats had been made against me by Navajo. In 1916 they technically murdered me, and the press carried the story because of the Indian flavor. I had the unusual experience of reading my obituary in many papers, and might have felt puffed up about it had I not recognized a tone of regret when the rumor was exploded. Now I knew there was someone on the porch, and if the someone had a good excuse for being there, why not announce it. Just as I prepared to send a shot across it, out of the silence came a faint gasping, as if the person sought to speak and could not. The woman was suffering from bronchitis, and had lost her voice in that cool ride across the desert. And she might have lost her voice entirely at the end of it.