Page:B M Bower - Heritage of the Sioux.djvu/229

"NOW, DANG IT, RIDE!" upon their reservation trying to arrest somebody. But they don't like jails, and if you persist in trailing their lawbreakers you are going to have trouble on your hands. The Happy Family, with Luck and Applehead, had no intention whatever of molesting the Navajos; but the Navajos did not know that, and they acted according to their lights and their ideas of honorable warfare.

Roused to resistance in behalf of their fellows, they straightway forsook their looms, where they wove rugs for tourists, and the silver which they fashioned into odd bracelets and rings; and the flocks of sheep whose wool they used in the rugs—and they went upon a quiet, crafty warpath against these persistent white men.

They stole their horses and started them well on the trail back to Albuquerque—since it is just as well to keep within the white men's law, if it may be done without suffering any great inconvenience. They would have preferred to keep the horses, but they decided to start them home and let them go. You could not call that stealing, and no one need go to jail for it. They failed to realize that these horses might be so thoroughly 217