“Help yourself when you’re lonely,” he said. “Most of the employees lack reading matter only when Montgomery Ward’s bible fails to come in.” He noted the book in my hand. “Now that Johnson—he was a great old guy, wasn’t he?” Criticism, à la Navajo! Years before, he had been a student at Hampton Institute, that excellent institution of the South where Negroes and a few Indians were trained. The books were his prizes, won in scholastic debates, and they had returned with him to the edge of the Enchanted Empire. Here he could feel the white man’s presence, enjoy a little of his society, read his books, and still be within call of his desert people. I have known Indian athletes who bartered their trophies when they returned to the old life. This strange Indian had kept his treasures, and at night, those long desert winter nights, when he tired of the Alhambra he could talk with Doctor Johnson (“a great old guy”); he could follow Macaulay down the ages to visit London in the days of Charles the Second; and sometimes he permitted Darwin to tell him of his beginnings. He knew the books, each and every one. He had stepped from paganism into a gentle skepticism, and his armor was not dented by snatches of the Scriptures. The good missionary people sighed about it; but they could be defeated by a quotation, and were. His comments on those novelists who treat the Desert as a stage and people it with costumes tricking out traditional characters, were acrid and amusing. A certain very popular writer would have been humbled after a short session with this half-savage critic. What he left of that writer’s Navajo picture was very little, and that little in shreds. As for his own people, their customs and superstitions, he had an equally sane view of them, and would explain many things that, farcical to the alien’s first thought, were no stranger when resolved than our own wives’ tales. He pictured for me the actual worthlessness of native policemen, a system that Washington is devoted to, while admitting all their skill as trackers and go-betweens. As an interpreter at trials, he was invaluable, and his knowledge of what a Navajo would do under given conditions was almost uncanny. Occupying the position of field-interpreter and chief of range police, this man would have been worth a very creditable salary, because he was undeniably honest, progressive, and without deceit. I urged him to accept such a position with me in later years, and when he gave his reasons for declining, one of them was the analysis of the superstitious native who would have to serve under him, and the other was the abject parsimony of the United States Government. I shall always remember and be grateful to that Navajo gentleman. He is dead. I do not know how he died. Perhaps he relented, and for his pagan jests begged forgiveness; perhaps he died to the Medicine Man’s chanting—counting, counting, as they always die in the Desert—calling on his tribal gods.