Clifford Knight's new "affair" is steeped in the mysterious, garish spell of the Painted Desert. Navajo Canyon, in the Western Navajo Indian Reservation, is one of the few places in America where actual ruins of the ancient cliff dwellers still remain. It was there that Huntoon Rogers went to spend his vacation, supposedly to study and rest. Naturally, he did not expect that a brutal murder would be committed practically on his doorstep, and when they found Bernice Patterson's body deep in the maw of the great canyon, he knew that there was work to be done. For a time there seemed to be no possible solution until Rogers remembered the significant fact that a white man on the Navajo reservation can do practically nothing unobserved by an Indian. Then he knew where to seek the clue to his riddle; and subsequent developments proved him right, but only in the nick of time.