Then Old Roaney gently slid into high,
Left me sittin' on nothin' but the sky.
There ain't no cowboy who is alive
Can ride Old Roaney when he makes his high dive!
When the piano player stopped and Frank struck a few soft chords on his guitar I knew they were getting sentimental. Pretty soon someone would begin to hum:
"When the dew is on the rose, and the world is all repose." ... Those rangers lived close to danger and hardships every day, but they had more real sentiment
in their makeup than any type of men I know. Maybe it's because women are so
scarce around them that they hold all womanhood in high regard. Most of them
dreamed of a home and wife and children, but few of them felt they had a right
to ask a woman to share their primitive mode of living. They might not jump up
to retrieve a dropped handkerchief, or stand at attention when a woman entered a room, but in their hearts they had a deep respect for every woman that showed
herself worthy.
Now and then, a certain son of Scotland, Major Hunter Clarkson, dropped in. He
was a real musician, and while I sewed and the Chief smoked he treated us to an
hour of true melody. He used to play the bagpipes at home with his four brothers, he said, and he admitted that at times the racket they made jarred his mother's china from the shelves!
He had served with the British forces in Egypt, and if he could have known how
interested we were in his experiences, he would have given us more than a bare
hint of the scenes that were enacted during the defense of the Dardanelles and the entrance into Jerusalem.
One night he was telling us something about the habits of the Turks they fought, when the telephone rang and interrupted the narrative, which was never finished.
The Chief had to go and investigate an attempted suicide.
It seemed that a lad under twenty, in Cleveland, had seen on a movie screen a picture of Grand Canyon. He tucked that vision away somewhere in his distorted
brain, and when he had his next quarrel with his mother he gathered together all his worldly wealth and invested it in a ticket to Grand Canyon. There he intended to end his troubles, and make his mother sorry she hadn't sewed on a button the instant he had asked her to! That was a touching scene he pictured to himself—his heart-broken mother weeping with remorse because her son had jumped into the Canyon.
But! When he reached the Rim and looked over, it was a long way to the bottom,
and there were sharp rocks there. Perhaps no one would ever find him, and what's the use of killing one's self if nobody knows about it? Something desperate had to be done, however, so he shot himself where he fancied his heart was located (he hit his stomach, which was a pretty close guess) with a cheap pistol he carried, hurled the gun into the Canyon, and started walking back to Headquarters. He met Ranger Winess making a patrol and reported to him that
he had committed suicide! Rangers West and Winess took care of him through the night, with Nurse Catti's supervision, and the next day the Chief took him to Flagstaff, where the bullet was removed and he was returned to his mother a sadder and a wiser boy.
There is some mysterious power about the Canyon that seems to make it impossible for a person to face the gorge and throw himself into it.
A young man, immensely wealthy, brought his fiancée to the Canyon for a day's
outing. At Williams, where they had lunch, he proposed that she go on to the Coast with him, but she refused, saying that she thought it was not the thing to do, since her mother expected her back home that night. He laughed and scribbled something on a paper which he tucked carelessly into a pocket of his
overcoat. They went on to the Canyon and joined a party that walked out beyond
Powell's Monument. He walked up to the Rim and stared into the depths, then turned facing his sweetheart. "Take my picture," he shouted; and while she bent over the kodak, he uttered a prayer, threw his arms up, and leaped backward into
the Canyon. He had not been able to face it and destroy the life God had given him. Hours later rangers recovered his body, and in his pocket found the paper
on which he had written: "You wouldn't go with me to Los Angeles, so it's goodbye!"
Ranger West came in one day and told me that there was a lot of sickness among
the children at an Indian encampment a few miles from Headquarters. I rode out
with him to see what was the matter and found that whooping-cough was rampant. For some reason, even though it was a very severe winter, the Supai Indians had come up from their home in Havasu Canyon, "Land of the Sky-Blue Water," made famous by Cadman, and were camped among the trees on a hillside. The barefoot women and dirty children were quite friendly, but the lazy, filthy bucks would have been insolent had I been alone. They lolled in the
"hewas," brush huts daubed with mud, while the women dragged in wood and the children filled sacks with snow to melt for drinking purposes. To be sure they didn't waste any of it in washing themselves.
They would not let me doctor the children, and several of them died; but we could never find where they were buried. It is a custom of that tribe to bury its members with the right arm sticking up out of the ground. In case it is a lordly man that has passed to the Happy Hunting Ground his pony is shot and propped
upright beside the grave with the reins clutched in the dead master's hand.
I thought I might be able to reach a better understanding with the women if the
men were not present, so I told them to bring all the baskets they made to my house and I would look at them and buy some of them. Beautiful baskets were
