a ghostly voice would be heard saying, ‘Your sainted Aunt Minnie bids me tell you to drill right here and you will bring in a second Spindletop.’”
“You can’t call me a crook!” Cavanaugh, his face scarlet with rage, lunged to his feet and advanced on his tormentor.
“I’m not calling you a crook—yet.” Donovan stood up too, knocked out his pipe and put it into his pants pocket. “If you would just stop making all of those wild-eyed claims for your detector, though, you would make out better out here.”
As Cavanaugh continued to advance he added mildly, “I suppose I ought to warn you that I studied judo when I was in college.”
“Excuse me for interrupting your fun, gentlemen,” a quiet voice broke in. “Is there anyone here named Quincy Taylor? An urgent telegram for him was just relayed down from Farmington.” Kenneth White, the Indian Agent, stood in the motel doorway holding a yellow envelope.
Nobody answered for a moment, but Cavanaugh took the opportunity to stomp out of the room while Donovan sat down quietly and started stoking his pipe.
“Hey, Quiz!” Sandy exploded at last. “Don’t you recognize your own name? It’s for you!”
His friend blushed with embarrassment as he accepted the wire, but his round face turned pale as he read it.
“Mr. Hall,” he choked at last. “It’s from Dad. He slipped and broke his leg in two places. I’m to come home immediately and run the restaurant while he’s laid up. Gee whiz!” He bit his lips to keep back the tears.
“That’s tough, Quiz.” The oilman came over and slipped a fatherly arm around the boy’s shoulders. “Your father will be all right soon, I’m sure, but we certainly will miss you up at the well. Now the problem is to get you back to Farmington quick so you can catch the midnight bus. I’ll send your things on, soon as we get back.”
“One of my trucks is returning to Farmington after supper,” spoke up the oilman named Tom. “You can go in that.”
“Thanks,” gulped Quiz.
The ban about talking at mealtime was broken that night. All the oil and uranium men were agreed that Cavanaugh was a bad-mannered blusterer, but they differed sharply about the value of his electronic detector.
“He has made several good uranium strikes with the thing,” a bearded prospector insisted, “though what good they’re going to do him I can’t imagine, with the government not buying except from established mills. But don’t sell Red Cavanaugh short. He has made millions out of electronics, they say. He knows electronics. He’s a smart operator. You keep an eye on the bids he makes tomorrow and you’ll see what I mean.”
“Well, I’m not throwing my seismograph away for a while yet,” Tom retorted. “I’ll put my money on Don’s opinion any day.”
The boys tried to follow the conversation, but Quiz’s heart was not in it, and he only picked at his food. Finally he excused himself and headed for the dining-room door with Sandy after him.
“It’s a tough break,” he said half an hour later while he and his pal stood at the edge of town and stared upward at that amazing natural bridge called the Window Rock.
“It sure is,” Sandy agreed glumly. “Maybe you can come back, though.”
“Not a chance. Dad will be laid up most of the summer, and he can’t afford to hire a manager, the way things are. There’s nothing I can—Hey! Look!” He grabbed Sandy’s arm and pointed. “See that point of light twinkling ’way up on top of the Window Rock? That isn’t a star, is it?”
“Nuh-uh!” Sandy watched the faint flicker a thousand feet above them. “That must be where Cavanaugh has pitched his camp. He’s sending a message of some kind over light beam. If it were a heliograph transmitting in Morse code I could read it. But that’s a modulated beam… Say, we’d better be moseying back to the motel. Must be about time for your truck to leave.”
“Sandy,” Quiz said half an hour later after they had shaken hands solemnly, “I’m going to do everything I can, when I get home, to do some detective work on Cavanaugh. If anything turns up, I’ll let you know quick.”
“Do that, Quiz.” Sandy swallowed and his voice broke. “Be seeing you.”
Quiz climbed slowly into the cab of the big tool truck. As it roared off into the starlit desert night he kept waving a forlorn farewell.
CHAPTER SIX
Cliff Dweller Country
Sandy had expected that the opening of bids for leases on thousands of acres in the Navajo reservation would be an exciting occasion, something like a country auction. Instead, he found it a great bore.
Scores of bidders in their shirt sleeves lounged on hard straight-backed chairs in the stuffy meeting room of the Indian Service building, or chatted, smoked and told jokes in the corridors. Kenneth White and other representatives of the Indian Service sat behind a long redwood table, opened piles of envelopes, compared bids, held long whispered conferences with grave, leather-faced members of the Navajo Council and their advisers, and very occasionally handed down decisions.
“The bid of $3,900 per acre made for 200 Navajo acres in San Juan County, northeast, southeast of Section 27-24 N-8 is accepted,” White then would drone. Or: “A bid of $318 per acre for 125 acres of Section 18, 42 north, 30 east is rejected by the Council because it’s too low. Another bid may be made at the August meeting, if desired.”
After an hour of this, Sandy was counting the cracks in the floor, watching flies buzzing against the windowpanes, and wondering whether he dared ask Mr. Hall to be excused. He hesitated about doing this because the oilman was following the bidding with tense interest and making endless notes on the backs of old envelopes that he kept dragging out of his vest pockets.
“Ssst!” Ralph whispered from the seat behind him. “This is murder. How about having a second breakfast with me?
“We never should have come down here this month when our well needs watching every minute,” the young Indian added after they had entered a nearly empty diner and ordered ham and eggs which neither of them really wanted. “The big companies have the big money, so they’ll gobble up the best of the acreage, as usual. We poor boys will get some small tracts, if we’re lucky. And I don’t think John Hall’s outfit is going to be lucky today.”
“Why is that?” Sandy asked.
“Because most of our bids are for land that’s under dispute between the Navajos and Hopis. They can’t be accepted until some sort of settlement is reached between the tribes. I don’t know why John keeps putting them in. Well—” Ralph finished his coffee and slid off the stool and onto his feet in one motion, like a big cat—“let’s go back and learn the worst.”
There was a strange tenseness in the meeting room when they entered. Cavanaugh and White were standing facing each other across the table. All eyes were riveted on them and not a sound was being made by the onlookers.
“Mr. Cavanaugh,” the Indian Agent was saying, “neither the Service nor the Council can understand the meaning of the bids you have submitted. Some of them are for small tracts around the Pinta Dome area in Apache country where there has never been the slightest show of uranium-bearing ore. I don’t
