yelled Chief Quail. In his excitement he forgot his careful grammar. “Water come. We die!”
He spoke too late. A roaring sound had begun far up the canyon. Before they could move, it grew deafening. At the same time a five-foot wall of yellow water swept down upon them like an express train.
After that, things happened too fast to be described. As he ran madly toward the canyon wall with the idea of climbing out of reach of the flash flood, Sandy slipped on a bank of wet clay and fell headlong. Ralph grabbed him by the collar and barely managed to drag him to safety.
Hall let out a wild yell as the dry sandbank on which he had been standing a moment before absorbed water like a sponge, turned to quicksand, and began to suck at his legs. Just before the wall of water struck, Donovan snatched up a long branch and held it out. Hall grasped it and, in turn, was pulled to comparative safety.
By this time the little trout stream had turned into a raging torrent. A great pine tree in its bed, roots torn loose by the tremendous sudden push of the water wall, came crashing down. A branch caught Ponytooth across the thighs and dragged him from sight beneath the flood.
Chief Quail, who was nearest to the Hopi, acted instinctively. He plunged into the frothing, rock-filled water and fought it with all the power of his massive shoulders. A moment later he was tumbling downstream with the old man held tightly in his arms.
While the others watched spellbound in the gathering darkness, the Navajo fought the cloudburst. Fifty yards downstream, he managed to hook a leg around a rock that still held firm. His face purple with effort, he finally succeeded in pulling his apparently lifeless burden to the top of a dry ledge.
Almost as quickly as it had come, the flood subsided. Dripping, cold and shaken, the little party headed back toward the pueblo ruins. Chief Quail walked ahead, carrying the Hopi in his arms.
An hour later Donovan rose from examining the Chief and looked across a campfire at the rest of them with a worried frown. The geologist had found Ponytooth’s only apparent injury—a broken leg—and had set it with expert fingers. But the old man failed to return to full consciousness thereafter. He threw his arms about and shouted wildly. His cheeks burned with sudden fever. When his little brown wife crept to his side, he ordered her away in a frenzy.
“I can’t understand it,” said Donovan. “So far as I can tell, he has no internal injuries. But the life is running out of him like water out of a sack. I’m afraid he may be dying.”
“He is dying,” Ralph spoke up softly. “I’ve been listening to his ravings. He thinks he has offended the water spirits by even talking to palefaces and a Navajo and a Ute about the tribe’s sacred boundary line. He thinks he must die to make his peace with the spirits. And so, he will die before the night is out.”
“Hosteen Quail,” said Hall, “Navajo chiefs are medicine men as well, aren’t they? Can’t you paint a sand picture or something, and cure Pony-tooth of his delusion?”
“No,” the Chief answered sadly. “Navajo magic works only for Navajos.”
“Let me try,” Ralph said suddenly. He gripped the Hopi’s shoulder to get his dazed attention, and spoke to him for a long time in Shoshonean.
The old man shook his head back and forth in disagreement, but he stopped picking at the moth-eaten buffalo robe which Donovan had thrown over him.
“I told him that the water spirits were not angry,” the Ute said at last. “He said I lied. I told him we are all his friends. He said to prove it. So I told him I would prove it by singing him well.” Ralph stood up slowly and paced around the fire three times in a counterclockwise direction. “My father was a medicine man,” he went on. “As a boy I watched him sing people well, but I never was allowed to try it, of course… Well, here goes… Wish me luck, Hosteen Quail.”
He leaned his head back against the ruined pueblo wall for a moment, as though gathering strength from the ancient building. Then he began to sing in his rich baritone.
At first the chant went slowly, slowly, like the beat of buffalo hoofs on the open prairie. Then, as Sandy held his breath to listen, the rhythm became faster. The words meant nothing to the boy, but somehow they painted pictures in his mind: A wild charge of naked Indian horsemen, dying in a hopeless effort to capture a fort from which white rifle smoke wreathed. The thundering rapids of some great northern river. Chirping of tree toads in the spring. A love song on some distant mesa. A bird call. The silence of a summer night…
“There!” Ralph whispered at last, his broad face dripping sweat.
He reached under Ponytooth’s robe and fumbled there for several moments. Almost, he seemed to be withdrawing some object from the old man’s body—something red and wet—like a fingernail!
The Hopi gave a long sigh. “Frens,” he murmured as he sank into peaceful slumber.
“He’ll be all right now,” said the Ute, “providing we take him to the hospital at Lukachukai quick to get that compound fracture fixed.”
He stumbled out into the darkness, which now was spangled with stars.
Her eyes round with faith and wonder, the little brown woman followed him. She was carrying a pot of steaming coffee.
* * * *
The less said about that awful midnight drive to Lukachukai, the better. Hall got them there somehow, while Chief Quail and Ralph held Pony tooth in their arms during the entire journey to protect his leg.
Then they had to go all the way back to Chinle for the jeep, but not before Chief Quail had made a detour to toss a piece of yellow carnotite ore on the wishing pile which stood near the entrance to Canyon de Chelly.
“It’s not that I like Hopis any better than I do Utes,” he said shamefacedly. “It’s just that I want Ponytooth’s leg to get well quick so we can settle the boundary dispute.”
“Well, here, I’ll chuck something on your silly pile, too.” Ralph twisted a ring off his finger and tossed it onto the big mound of stones. “Me Boy Scout. Always do good turn.” But he turned away so the others couldn’t see his face.
They got a few hours’ sleep at Thunderbird, but a much-relayed telegram dragged them out of bed before sunup. It was from Jack Boyd, the diesel engine man at the well, and it read:
SHE’S ACTING UP STOP HAVE HER STUFFED FULL OF MUD STOP HURRY
More dead than alive, they pulled onto Hall’s property to find that things had calmed down. Drilling was proceeding as usual, in fact, and Boyd was covered with embarrassment.
As Ralph and Sandy stood outside the bunk trailer, almost too tired to go in and take their clothes off, the driller said lazily, “See that big mountain there to the north? What does it remind you of?”
Sandy blinked the sleep out of his eyes and stared. The mountain in question had a big round cliff at one end, a long high ridge in its center, two branching ridges farther along, and sharply pointed cliffs at its other end.
“Why,” he said at last, “it looks like a man lying on his back.”
“Good boy. That’s what it is.” Ralph grinned. “That mountain is called the Sleeping Ute. It’s supposed to be a great warrior who will awake some day, to unite all the Indians…
