jeep’s front wheel had dropped into a pothole with a terrific thump.
They found that the axle had wedged itself against a rock. Thirty minutes later, while they were still trying to get it loose, a rattletrap car pulled up beside them and an Indian stuck his flat, mahogany-colored face through its window.
“Give us a hand—please,” Pepper ordered. The newcomer started to get out. Then his black eyes settled on the lettering on the side of the trailer:
Cavanaugh Laboratories
Farmington, N.M. & Valley View, Cal.
“Cavanaugh! Huh!” snorted the Indian. He slammed the door of his car and roared off in a cloud of yellow dust.
“Those confounded Indians,” snarled Pepper, staring after him in white-faced fury. “I’d like to… Oh, well. Come on, fellows. Guess we’ve got to do this ourselves.”
They finally got the jeep back on the trail and drove the twenty miles to Elbow Rock without further mishap. There Pepper parked beside a sparkling trout stream. They raided the trailer’s big freezer for sandwich materials and ate lunch at a spot overlooking a thousand square miles of yellow desert backed by blue, snowcapped peaks. Pepper was at his best as a host. For once in their lives, Sandy and Quiz almost liked him. At least here he seemed much pleasanter than he did at home, lording it over everyone—or trying to.
In the cool of the afternoon—85 degrees in the sun instead of the 110 degrees the thermometer had shown at noon—they rode the jeep back to Farmington by way of a wide detour that took them within sight of the San Juan River gorge.
“I wanted to show you those two oil-well derricks over yonder,” Pepper explained. “They’re a mile and a half apart, as the crow flies. But, because they’re on opposite sides of the river, they were 125 long miles apart by car until we got that new bridge finished a few months ago. Shows you the problems we explorers face.”
“The San Juan runs into the Colorado, doesn’t it?” Quiz asked as he studied the tiny stream at the bottom of its deep gorge, under the fine new steel bridge.
“Yep. And thereby hangs a tale. Mr. Cavanaugh—Red, I mean—has found state documents down at Santa Fe showing that the San Juan used to be navigable. But the confounded dumb Indians swear it can’t be navigated. If boats can go down the stream, even during part of the year, the river bed belongs to the Federal government. If the stream can’t be navigated, the Navajos own the bed. That’s the law! While the argument continues, nobody can lease uranium or oil land near the river. Red says that, one of these days, he’s going to prove that—oops! I’m talking too much!”
Pepper clammed up for the first time they could remember. He said hardly a word until he dropped them off at Hall’s motel.
“I don’t get it,” Quiz said to his chum as they walked up a graveled path from the road to the rambling adobe building.
“Don’t get what?” Sandy wanted to know.
“This uranium hunting business Pepper’s got himself into. I read in Time a while back that the Federal government stopped buying uranium from prospectors in 1957. Since then, it has bought from existing mills, but it hasn’t signed a single new contract. Cavanaugh doesn’t own a uranium mill. So why is he snooping around, digging into state documents and antagonizing the Indians?”
“I only met him once, when he snooted our exhibit as a judge at the regional science fair,” Sandy replied. “Can’t say I took to him, under the circumstances.”
“There’s something phony about that man. If only I could remember…something to do with football, I think.” Quiz scratched his head, but no more information came out.
They found Mr. Hall, dressed as usual in faded levis and denim shirt, sitting with several other guests of the motel on a wide patio facing the setting sun.
“Well, here are my roustabouts,” the little man cried with a flash of those too-perfect teeth. “I was beginning to be afraid that you had lost yourselves in the desert.”
He introduced them to the owners of the place, two maiden ladies from Minnesota who plainly were having the time of their middle-aged lives here on the last frontier. The Misses Emery, as alike as two wrinkled peas, showed the boys to their room, a comfortable place complete with fireplace and an air conditioner.
“Supper will be served in half an hour,” said one.
“Don’t be late,” said the other.
The newcomers scrubbed the sticky dust off their bodies and out of their hair, changed into clothes that didn’t smell of jeep, and were heading for the dining room when Mr. Hall overtook them.
“You may be wondering why I live out here on the edge of the desert,” he said quietly. “One reason is that I like the silence of desert nights. Another is the good cooking. The most important reason, though, is that some of the Farmington places are pretty nasty to Indians and Mexicans. Me, I like Indians and Mexes. Also, I learn a lot from them when they let their hair down. Well, here we are. You’ll find that the Misses Emery still cook like Mother used to. I’ll give you a tip. Don’t talk during supper. It isn’t considered polite in the Southwest.”
“Why is that?” Sandy wondered.
“It’s a hang-over from cowpunching days. If a ranch hand stopped to talk, somebody else grabbed his second helping.”
After a silent meal, the guests gathered on the patio to watch the stars come out.
“Folks,” said Mr. Hall, “meet Sandy Steele and Quiz Taylor. They’re going to join my crew this summer. Boys, meet Miss Kitty Gonzales, from Window Rock, Arizona. She’s going north in the morning to teach school in the part of the Navajo reservation that extends into Utah. Her schoolhouse will be a big trailer. Too bad you can’t be her students, eh? But sixteen is a mite old for Miss Kitty’s class.”
Kitty was slim, in her late teens, and not much over five feet tall. She had an oval face, black hair and eyes, and a warm smile that made the newcomers like her at once.
“This is Kenneth White,” Hall went on. “Ken works for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. When he talks, you listen!”
The white-haired man gave the boys handshakes that they felt for an hour.
“Chief John Quail, from the Arizona side of the Navajo reservation,” Hall said next. “The chief is here to talk over an oil lease.”
Chief Quail, a dark, heavily muscled Indian, wore a light-gray business suit that showed evidence of the best tailoring. He surprised the boys by giving them the limpest of handshakes.
“And Ralph Salmon, boss of my drill crew,” Hall concluded. “Ralph’s a southern Ute from Colorado. Do exactly as he says this summer if you want to learn oil.”
The lithe, golden-skinned young Indian nodded, but did not shake hands.
“So you’re off to your great adventure in the morning, Kitty,” White said to break the conversational ice. He lighted a pipe and leaned against the patio railing where he could watch the changing evening light as it stole over the desert.
“I’m so excited I won’t be able to sleep,” the girl
