“They have,” said he, while a sheepish expression came over his aimless face. “They’re holding an inquiry into a white man’s fighting an Indian. You can’t lay a finger on these Hopis, they baby them so. Fact is,” he said in a burst of confidence, “I’m the man that did it. A buck called me something I wouldn’t stand from no one, so I jest lit into him. I was goin’ to kill him, but I kinder changed my mind,--and slapped him instead.” He looked as if his mind would make such changes. He went on with much violence of expression to give his opinion of the white settlers on the reservations, especially the missionaries,--“they stay here so long they git all dried up, and jest nachally hate themselves and everybody else.” His annoyance against the world was so large that we made haste to leave him. It was too hot to champion anyone’s grievances, and his seemed dubious. I felt sorry for the Indians who had to deal with him. Indian reservations, as we saw them, always seemed to harbor a certain proportion of white vultures who were not calculated to increase the Indian’s gratitude or respect for the Great Father, and some of them, unhappily, were in government employ. We engaged a little boy to act as our guide to the villages on the mesa in which he lived, who thought more, we afterward discovered, of getting a ride in an automobile,--the delight of all Indians--than of his duties as guide. Not many white drivers, I dare say, have been up that rocky and primitive road which leads to the ancient village of Walpi. The natives told us we could do it, so we started. Two roads led to the wagon trail. Our little guide, who was as tongue-tied as most Indian children, was for directing us toward one, when a fat woman, hung with jewels, and clad in a cerise wrapper, leaned over a fence and argued the point with him. Polacca sees more strangers than any other Hopi village, owing to its position, and the importance of the snake dance which takes place there every September, yet visitors were rare enough for us and our car to be objects of interest. So we followed her advice and took the other road, and a few rods further, came to a dead stop in the deep beach sand which surrounds the town. It was only the third or fourth time it had happened, so that we did not despair, though we did not relish the thought of another half hour’s digging and shoving under the burning, sickening heat of the desert sun. Our guide took the inevitable quarter hour for reflection common to Indians, then he summoned his juvenile playmates, and they cut bush for us, and tramped it into the bad places until we were able to go on sooner than we expected. We branched on to a road, roughly paved with great rocks, and rutted by the cart wheels of three centuries, like the dead streets of Pompeii. The nose of the car began to point skyward, and climbed up, up, while the desert dropped away from us. To go over that road once is an experience, but I should not care to repeat it often.