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 broken to camp ways that they would prefer the camp of the Happy Family to a long trail that held only a memory of discomfort; they did not know that every night these horses were given grain by the camp-fire, and that they would remember it when feeding time came again.
So the horses, led by wise old Johnny, swung in a large circle when their Indian drivers left them, and went back to their men.
Then the Navajos, finding that simple maneuver a failure--and too late to prevent its failing without risk of being discovered and forced into an open fight--got together and tried something else; something more characteristically Indian and therefore more actively hostile.