A vague sense of uneasiness added to his discomfort, but for some time he couldn’t determine the cause of it.
True, it was late to be just waking up. The slant of a sunbeam laden with dancing dust particles told him the sun was nearly two hours high. But time had never been any concern of South Boy’s. So he lay and listened, his heart beating slow and in instinctive apprehension, his eyes rolling, cautiously taking in everything within the narrow limits of his sleeping quarters. They rested at the entrance of one of the hives. There was no traffic to and fro. A small, restless swarm buzzed about the entrance, wings fanning furiously. From within that hive and the other came a deeper, muffled buzzing that was almost like the sound of gourd rattles shaken furiously, far off. The bees were desperately fanning air to their young.
“I know what’s the matter,” said South Boy, getting up. “It’s hot!”
He ducked out into the blinding, stunning glare of the sun and headed for the olla that hung in the grape arbor alongside the summer kitchen.
One gourd of cold water in his stomach and another doused over his head chased away the dim half-dread, and he reached up and snipped off a bunch of brown-ripe, sugar-sweet muscats and began methodically popping the grapes into his mouth, shivering delightedly as the water that dripped from his rope-colored, half-long hair trickled inside the open collar of his faded blue shirt and ran down his spine. Thus, for several minutes he enjoyed himself—eating, shivering, staring at the damp, burlap-wrapped water jar, wondering about what sort of miracle it wrought in making the water within it so much colder than the air without. Someone had told him “evaporation,” but he was still asking himself “Why?”
He glanced over at the big spirit thermometer hanging in the deepest shade against the canvas lower wall of the summer kitchen and shook his head when he saw that the column of red liquid stood at no. At noon, a temperature of a hundred and ten would have been nothing to remark about, but at seven in the morning—South Boy said “Uh-huh, hot!” He began listening for small noises that should be heard at that time in the morning, but there were none. The world about was already wrapped in the dead, heavy silence brought about by the desert’s midday heat.
From inside the kitchen a querulous voice called, “Chico?”
“Hi!” croaked South Boy.
“Vente! Vente!” the voice cracked angrily.
“Vengo, ya,” grumbled South Boy; and then he said to himself in English, “I bet a short-bit we’re in for a spell of crazy weather!” and tossed away the grape stem.
It was stifling in the screen-and-canvas summer kitchen. South Boy let the screen door slam just to relieve the untimely stillness and sat down at the near end of a long plank table. A huge Mexican woman in a gray wrapper, the sweat streaming down her fat face, flounced angrily over to the stove, dumped tepid, soggy flapjacks and limp bacon from a frying pan onto a chipped enamel plate, and slid it down the length of the table before she slopped a crockery cup full of coffee from a gallon pot.
South Boy reached for the syrup. The cook slumped down into her old rocker by the stove and glared at him. He knew why she was angry. She was a creature of habit and never left the kitchen until all the men had been fed; so, waiting for him, she’d sat there and stewed when she might have been under the shade of her favorite willow by the main irrigating ditch since sunup if he’d have come to breakfast at the regular time. He knew if she’d been a white woman or a Mojave she’d have hunted him up long ago and given him a jawing for keeping her waiting. But this woman came from some obscure, subjected race down on the Mexican plateau—a people that had been serfs of the Spaniards for four hundred years and serfs of unknown red masters for generations before that. So she didn’t speak out, but glowered and sulked and chewed on her grievance after the manner of the downtrodden, and brooded over some devious retaliation in the depth of her mind like a hen owl brooding over her eggs.
It came to South Boy then that he should say something to excuse himself for the inconvenience he had caused her. He would have said it, too, if she had been able to understand English or Mojave; but the heat made his mind too lazy to think up the appropriate Mexican phrases. Instead it slipped easily into making and rejecting plans for his day as he sopped up syrup with sections of flapjack.
He thought of twisting a new hair rope, or cleaning his saddle, or going fishing, or hunting up his old friend the trapper, called the Mormonhater; but he rejected each of these ideas as it came up: Too much work . . . Too much traveling . . . The Mormonhater might be hard to find. His boat hadn’t been seen in the near stretches of the river for a couple of months . . .
Just as he wiped up the last of the syrup with the last leathery sop, the cook broke out with a mirthless, cackling giggle. He looked up to see a fat forefinger pointed at his head.
“Bonitos—cabellos—lar-r-rgos,” she droned with a slow exaggeration of dega dialect of the peon that denoted heavy sarcasm. South Boy batted his eyes and chewed methodically, trying to figure out what she was up to.
“Un otro Boofalo Beel, como El Bravo!” she continued, staring at South Boy with sullen expectancy. South Boy stared back at her complacently, mumbling over her words. “Pretty long hair. Another Buffalo Bill, like El Bravo,” she said in a tone that was deliberately insulting.
He knew El Bravo, the Tough Guy, was her name for her husband, a moody and combative exile from Texas who bossed the ranch when South Boy’s father wasn’t around to do his own bossing. He knew that El Bravo wore his hair down to his shoulders and that on the wall of his bedroom, where he could see it every morning when he awoke, he had tacked a signed photograph of Colonel Cody. Not that he admired the Colonel so much; in fact he said publicly that he could out-shoot, outride, and even outdrink Bill Cody any time. South Boy had heard him make the statement. The Foreman had kept the picture as a symbol of what might have been. For El Bravo was once well on the way to becoming a celebrated Western Character himself.
He’d been a trail driver, a ranger, a valiant fighter against the Apache and the Comanche, and a rare shot with a rifle and pistol. About the time when Colonel Cody was making headlines with the European tour of his Wild West Show, certain men of money decided to put El Bravo on the road with a show of his own. But it so happened that on the eve of the launching of the enterprise, El Bravo had to kill one of the backers of his show, a person of wide family connections and considerable political influence.
So El Bravo rode for Arizona with vengeance on his heels, and instead of becoming the darling of the crowds in the East and in Europe entertained by duchesses and such, he went on a prolonged drunk in Prescott and woke up legally married to this Mexican woman. Now he was working on a little two-by-four ranch—his own description—married to a hay bag he was shamed to take to Needles, even.
All this South Boy knew very well, because the Foreman had often told him. He didn’t know that the Hay Bag had long since discovered that she could avenge herself upon her husband by simply pointing her finger at him and drawling, “Como Boofalo Beel, no?” Sometimes he would brood for days afterwards. South Boy didn’t understand that she expected the same reaction from any other long-haired male. So he just blinked at her, puzzled.
“Como Boofalo Beel, no?” she cried, her voice rising.
Then she did what the daughters of the downtrodden never do except in last desperation. She resorted to violence. She seized the pot off the stove and threw it at South Boy.
South Boy, who was through eating, ducked the pot handily and dived out through the door. He paused for a moment under the grape arbor and listened to the turmoil of dish-smashing going on within. He glanced at the red column of the thermometer—114, and rising.
“Yep,
