The Indian eyed him furtively from under heavy eyebrows while he smoked. And the sun beat savagely down upon the sand of that basin, and Luck's vision blurred with the pain that throbbed behind his eyes. But the facial discipline of the actor was his to command, and he permitted his face to give no sign of what he felt or thought.
The Indian leaned slowly, lifted a brown hand, made a studied gesture or two and waited, his eyes fixed unwinkingly upon Luck. It was as if he were saying to himself: " We'll see if this white man can speak in the sign-talk of the Indians."
Luck lifted his two hands, drew them slowly apart to say that he had come a long way. Then, using only his hands — sometimes his fingers only — he began to talk; to tell the old Navajo that he and eight other white men were sheriffs and that they were chasing four white men (since he had no sign that meant Mexican) who had stolen money; that they had come from Albuquerque — and there he began to draw in the sand between them a crude 279
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but thoroughly understandable sketch of the trail they had taken and the camps they had made, and the distance they believed the four thieves had travelled ahead of them.
He marked the camp where their horses had been stolen from them and told how long they had waited there until the horses of their own accord returned to camp; thirteen horses, he explained to the old Navajo. He drew a rough square to indicate the square butte, sketched the fork of the trail there and told how four men had turned to the north on a false trail, while he and four others had gone around the southern end of the hill. He calmly made plain that at the end of both false trails a trap had been laid, that Indians had fired upon white men and for no just cause. Why was this so? Why had Indians surrounded them back there in the grove and tried to kill them? Why were Indians shooting at them from the ledge of rocks that circled this little basin ? They had no quarrel with the Navajos. They were chasing thieves, to take them to jail.
Folded swelteringly in his red blanket, the old Indian sat humped forward a little, smoking 280
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slowly his cigarette and studying the sketch Luck had drawn for him. With aching head and parched throat and hungry stomach, Luck sat cross-legged on the hot sand and waited, and would not let his face betray any emotion at all. Up on the rim-rock brown faces peered down steadfastly at the pow-wow. And back among the rocks and bushes the Happy Family waited restively with eyes turning in all directions guarding against treachery; and Lite, whose bullets always went straight to the spot where they were aimed, stood and stared fixedly over his rifle sights at the red-blanketed figure squatted in the sand and kept his finger crooked upon the trigger. Beside him Ap-plehead fidgeted and grumbled and called Luck names for being so dang slow, and wondered if those two out there meant to sit and chew the rag all day.
The Indian leaned and traced Luck's trail slowly with his finger. Did the four white men come that way ? he asked in sign. And then, had Luck seen them? Was he sure that he was following the four who had stolen money in Albuquerque ?
Come to think of it, Luck was not sure to the 281
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point of being able to take oath that it was so. He traced again where the hoofprints had been discovered near the stalled automobile, and signed that the six horses they believed to have belonged to the four who had taken two horses packed with food and blankets — and the stolen money.
Then suddenly Luck remembered that, for proof of his story, he had a page of the Evening Herald in his pocket, torn from a copy he had bought on the streets the evening after the robbery. He pulled the folded paper out, spread it before the other and pointed to the article that told of the robbery. " Call some young man of your tribe who can read," he signed. " Let him read and tell you if I have spoken the truth."
The Indian took the paper and looked at it curiously.
Now, unless Applehead or some other hot-head spoiled things, Luck believed that things would smooth down beautifully. There had been some misunderstanding, evidently — else the Indians would never have manifested all this old-fashioned hostility.
The blanketed one showed himself a true diplo-282
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mat. " Call one of your white men, that there may be two and two," he gestured. And he added, with the first words he had spoken since they met, " Hablo espafiol ? »
Well, if he spoke Spanish, thought Luck, why the deuce hadn't he done it at first ? But there is no fathoming the reticence of an Indian — and Luck, by a sudden impulse, hid his own knowledge of the language. He stood up and turned toward the rocks, cupped his hands around his lips and called for the Native Son. " And leave your rifle at home," he added as an afterthought and in the interests of peace.
The Indian turned to the rim-rock, held up the fragment of newspaper and called for one whom he called Juan. Presently Juan's Stetson appeared above the ledge, and Juan himself scrambled hastily down the rift and came to them, grinning with his lips and showing a row of beautifully even teeth, and asking suspicious questions with his black eyes that shone through narrowed lids.
Miguel, arriving just then from the opposite direction, sized him up with one heavy-lashed glance and nodded negligently. He had left his 283
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rifle behind him as he had been told, but his six-shooter hung inside the waistband of his trousers where he could grip it with a single drop of his hand. The Native Son, lazy as he looked, was not taking any chances.
The old Indian explained in Navajo to the young man who eyed the two white men while he listened. Of the blanket-vending, depot-haunting type was this young man, with a ready smile and a quick eye for a bargain and a smattering of English learned in his youth at a mission, and a larger vocabulary of Mexican that lent him fluency of speech when the mood to talk was on him. Half of his hair was cut so that it hung even with his ear-lobes. At the back it was long and looped up in the way a horse's tail is looped in muddy weather, and tied with a grimy red ribbon wound round and round it. He wore a green-and-white roughneck sweater broadly striped, and the blue overalls that inevitably follow American civilization into the wild places.
" 'S hot day," he announced unemotionally, and took the paper which the red-blanketed one held out to him. His air of condescension could not 284
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hide the fact that behind his pride at being able to read print he was unhappily aware also of his limitations in the accomplishment. Along the scare-head Luck had indicated, his dirty forefinger moved slowly while he spelled out the words. " A-a-bank rob! " he read triumphantly, and repeated the statement in Spanish. After that he mumbled a good deal of it, the longer words arresting his finger while he struggled with the syllables. But he got the sense of it nevertheless, as Luck and Miguel knew by the version he gave in Spanish to the old Indian, with now and then a ISTavajo word to help out.
When he came to the place where Eamon Chavez and Luis Eojas were named as the thieves, he gave a grunt and looked up at Luck and Miguel, read in their faces that these were the men they sought, and grinned.
" Me, I know them feller," he declared unexpectedly. " Dat day I seen them feller. They go-"
The old Indian touched him on the shoulder, and Juan turned and repeated the statement in Spanish. The old man's eyes went to Luck understandingly 285
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while he asked Juan a question in the Navajo tongue, and afterwards gave a command. He turned his eyes upon the Native Son and spoke in Spanish. " The men you want did not come this way/' he said gravely. " Juan will tell."
" Yes, I know dat Ramon Chavez. I seen him dat day. I'm start for home, an' I seen Ramon Chavez an' dat Luis Eojas an' one white feller — I'm don't know dat feller. They don't got red car. They got big, black car. They come outa corral — scare my horse. They go 'cross railroad. I go 'cross rio. One red car pass me. I go along, bimeby I pass red car in sand. Ramon Chavez, he don't go in dat car. I don't know them feller. Ramon Chavez he go 'cross railroad in big black car."