"We're going to put out extra guards tonight, just the same.
And I guess you can stand the first shift, Happy, up there on the
ridge--you're so sure of things!"
CHAPTER XV. "NOW, DANG IT, RIDE!"
Indians are Indians, though they wear the green sweater and overalls of
civilization and set upon their black hair the hat made famous by John B.
Stetson. You may meet them in town and think them tamed to stupidity. You may
travel out upon their reservations and find them shearing sheep or hoeing corn
or plodding along the furrow, plowing their fields; or you may watch them
dancing grotesquely in their festivals, and still think that civilization is
fast erasing the savage instincts from their natures. You will be partly right
--but you will also be partly mistaken. An Indian is always an Indian, and a
Navajo Indian carries a thinner crust of civilization than do some others; as
I am going to illustrate.
As you have suspected, the Happy Family was not following the trail of Ramon
Chavez and his band. Ramon was a good many miles away in another direction;
unwittingly the Happy Family was keeping doggedly upon the trail of a party of
renegade Navajos who had been out on a thieving expedition among those
Mexicans who live upon the Rio Grande bottomland.
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