Show the old settler albert R lyman my dear san Jua ners chippy cr appy lehi is dead the gloom mystery which hovered over his lief is eclipsed by the strange circumstances surrounding his death he was an outcast dating from a love match between individuals of unfriendly tribes chippy was born ol of a navajo father and a piute diute mother he made his beginning in the 1 eighties of the nineties and he lived all that was at all pleasant of his short childhood in the sunny wilds of that remote piute diute navajo borderland 1 I 1 at navajo mountain the broken heights from down on the junction of the san juan I 1 and the colorado was burn born to be a navajo though it remained for him to prove iliin himself better than his strain of foreign blood he waddled toddled away from his cradle board with no notion of what a devilish 1 world orld he had come into then all that was happy and trustful of humanity in his carefree care free childhood was vitiated and embittered by the inhumanity of these he trusted there is no authentic record of just what happened to the little boy we know that he became an exile from his native mountain that his feet were so badly withered and twisted out of shape that he could not year wear shoes he wrapped his feet in rags and traveled nowhere beyond where ho he could urge his poney to go ga the why and the how of it was a forbidden subject of conversation among the clutes of allan canyon with whom he made his home this much true or false is told in explanation of how it came about chippy violated vib some moral tradition of the tribe something sor which had long been barred under a terrible taboo and in their fury they held his feet in the tire fire till they hey 1 were cooked and twisted beyond all chance of ever growing or being normal again the months and years of anguish following that agonizing ordeal the bitterness and utter distrust of mankind is only to bo be guessed the cheer and sunshine of his mountain home became dark with animosity and he left there to find what might be left of comfort in the world among his mothers people he never became a piute diute in appearance he lived with them and spoke their language without forgetting his own he never married he called the clutes his people regarding the nava jos with vengeful memories and withholding his soul from them neither could he become one with his mothers people as a person free of foreign blood the fire of navajo vengeance had branded him as a lone wolf and the loneness of it in spite of all the friends he made in his exile he often hunted alone in spite of his dependence pen dence on his cayuse for locomotion thus it was nothing at which to wonder when he left the camp three or four years ago to hunt alone on the mountain west of allan canyon yet when he failed to return as ex pecked they sought out and followed h his is dim track they found him dead where apparently he had fallen without a struggle e from the saddle of this final act in the strange drama not a great lot is said it is easy to assign his death to some likely cause heart fail ure cerebral hemorrhage or any one of many similar maladies from which men pass in a moment out of the pia ure and yet coming as it did off there in the solitude behind the screen of distance and following a life secret hidden by another screen it the final mystery of a mysterious life albert R lyman |