“Get in and help,” said an old squaw to me. Accordingly I grasped a rough horn, and discovered it took strength and some skill to keep the animals from being trampled, as they went down the trough. Once a tremendous chatter arose, as a result of the squaws counting their sheep and finding one missing. The poor creature was discovered, crushed and bleeding at the bottom of the runway. Immediately he was fished out, and borne off by two women whom I followed to watch. One held the carcass, while the other pulled from her woven belt a long, glittering knife. In twenty minutes the sheep was skinned, dressed and cut into neat chops and loins, and the incident was closed. The women are sole owners and custodians of the sheep-herds. The gathering that day would have rejoiced the heart of any feminist. With one old hag I noticed a beautiful little Navajo child dressed in the usual velvet jacket, flowing skirt and silver ornaments. Two lumps of turquoise were strung in her ears. Her eyes, like her skin, were golden brown and her hair bright yellow. Her unusual complexion added to her beauty made her a pet of the entire village, and the idol of her old grandmother. If she was an Albino, the lack of pigment took a more becoming form than among the Hopis. Mesa Verde National Park is only a short day’s run from Shiprock. It took us into the edge of Colorado, a beautiful, loveable state, endowed with sense, mountains, good roads and every kind of natural blessing. It has a flavor all its own; more mellow than the states of the West coast, less prim than those on its eastern borders. Our way led between two mountain ranges, one in Utah, the other in Colorado, with a long sweep of prairies curling like waves at their base. We passed a corner of the Ute country, and saw at a spring a group of those gaily dressed, rather sullen people, ample bodied and round headed. Each tribe differs from the others, and these bore a look more like the Northern tribes than those we had already met. As the Colorado mountains came nearer, I remembered the words of a fellow traveler, spoken on the slippery drive to Taos, New Mexico, which had haunted me ever since. “This is steep enough, but wait till you climb Mesa Verde. The engineer cut a road straight up the mountain to the top, with as few switchbacks and as little grading as he could. It is so narrow that you have to telephone your arrival when you reach the base of the hill, and they shut off all downward traffic till you report at the Park.” We were both by this time inured to horizontal fever, and could steer quite debonairly within an inch of a thousand foot drop, but we “figured,” as they say out West, that we had about reached our limit, and if we were to encounter anything more vertiginous, something _might_ happen. I don’t say we dreaded Mesa Verde, but I will admit we speculated over our prospects.