In this achievement--and a difficult one, for the Navajo is a wary soul,--he was greatly helped by Mrs. Wetherell, who possesses an almost uncanny understanding and sympathy for the Navajo that make her a more trustworthy Indian student than many an ethnologist learned in the past, but little versed in Indian nature. She speaks their tongue like a native, and has their confidence as they seldom give it to any of the white race. They have entrusted to her secrets of their tribe, and because she keeps their secrets, they reveal others to her. When the “flu” swept across the desert, it was particularly virulent among the Southwest Indians. They died like flies in their hogans, in carts on the road, and beside their flocks. Babies hardly able to talk were found, the only living members of their family. An appalling number of the tribe was lost. Government medical aid, never too adequate on an Indian reservation, could not cope with the overwhelming attack. Missionaries forgot creeds and dogma, and fought with lysol and antiseptic gauze. The “medicine men” shut the doors of the hogans, built fires to smoke out the bad spirits, filled the air with noises and generally made medicine more deadly to the patient than to the devils that possessed them. Mrs. Wetherell and her family hardly slept, but rode back and forth through the reservation, nursing, substituting disinfectants and fresh air for “medicine,” took filthy and dying patients to her own home till it became a hospital, and prepared the dead for burial. Parenthetically, from this epidemic comes a piquant example of the way fact can always be bent to substantiate creed. Soon after the “flu” had reaped its harvest, a fatal distemper struck the horses and cattle on the reservation. Following the human epidemic, it was cumulatively disastrous. But the Navajo could explain it. In the old days, when a chief or warrior died, his favorite horse was buried beside him, so that he might ride properly mounted into the happy hunting ground. To the Indian mind it was only logical that when the influenza swept away hundreds of men, as many horses should go with them to Paradise. When the United States entered the world war, Mrs. Wetherell saddled her horse, put food and a bedding roll on a pack-mule, and went far into the interior of the reservation, wherever a settlement of Navajos could be found. Most of them had never heard of the war. She told them of the government’s need for their help, till she aroused them from indifference to a patriotism the more touching because as a race they had little reason for gratitude toward a too-paternal government. Out of their flocks they promised each a sheep,--no mean gift at the war price. When the “flu” epidemic interrupted her work, she had already raised $3000 among a people as far from the Hindenburg line, psychologically, as the Eskimos or Patagonians.