The picturesque wickedness of the westward traveling construction camp with its fringe of saloons, gambling hells, and camp followers seems never to have taken Wupa in its snares. Of shooting irons and drunken men he had the inborn terror shown always by the Hopi, a feeling still kept alive among them by that later incursion into New Mexico and Arizona, the Texas cowboy. There was no fight in Wupa; the most that could be gotten out of him was a disarming laugh and a disappearance, as soon as that move could be made. Picturesque as was the construction camp, the stern side of life came very near, and the wonderful hues of the landscape were but mockery to the tired and thirsty men, who prepared the Santa Fé Trail for the iron horse. Poor food, worse water, alkali dust, parching heat and chilly nights of summer and the severity of winter were living realities; there were health and vigor in the air of the mountains and elevated plateaus, though food and appetite did not always strike a balance of compensation. Wupa moved along with the camp, little realizing the meaning of the struggle with the drifting sand, the rocky canyons, and the dry rivers that became torrents and in an hour swept away the work of a month, burying ties and rails in the limbo of boiling sand. By night he rolled himself in his blanket and after his orisons slept under the brilliant stars, while his fellow Mexicans snored in strangely assorted heaps among the sage-clumps. The rails came down the treacherous Puerco and along the banks of the Little Colorado. To the north the dark blue Hopi Domes reared their fantastic summits, signifying nothing to this expatriated Indian, though the mother who bore him and sold him into bondage waited for him there. To the west the San Francisco peaks stood always in view, but Wupa was ignorant of the traditions of his tribe that cluster around them. The rails left the river, stretched across a flat country, and halted at the edge of a tremendous chasm, whose presence could not be suspected until it yawned beneath the feet. Here the camp halted for months, while a spider's web of steel was spun across the Devil's Canyon. One day several Hopi came to the camp, and after staring, open-mouthed, at the labors of the white man, wandered about, as if looking for someone. Soon they ran across Wupa, and the leader spoke to him in Hopi language to this effect: "You are a Hopi; we come to bring you to your house." A doubtful shake of the head from Wupa, who did not understand the tongue of his people. "Yes, come; they sit up there waiting for you." This ought to have stirred in Wupa a desire to go at once, but he "no sabe." Finally, after parleying in a mixture of Hopi, Zuñi, and Spanish, pieced out here and there with sign language, they persuaded him to desert the camp and set out with them for his native town a hundred miles to the north.