  “This sure isn’t my idea of a boom town!” Sandy grumbled as he and Quiz got off the eastbound Greyhound at Farmington, New Mexico, dropped their dusty bags and stood watching the early morning bustle on the little town’s wide streets. “Yeah.” Quiz wagged his head. “The Wild West shore ain’t what she used to be, pardner. No twenty-mule-team wagons stuck in Main Street mudholes. No gambling dives in evidence. No false store fronts. No sheriff in a white hat walkin’ slowlike down a wooden sidewalk to shoot it out with the bad man in a black hat. Ah, for the good old days.” “Oh, go fly a jet,” Sandy grinned. “Let’s look up Mr. Hall. Funny, his giving us his home address. He must have an office in town.” They strolled along, noticing the new stores and office buildings, the modern high school. Farmington would never become a ghost town. It was building solidly for the future. Suddenly Quiz grabbed his friend’s arm. “Look at that oilman who’s just made a strike,” he said. “We’ll ask him if he knows Mr. Hall.” “How do you know that he is, and has?” Sandy demanded as they approached a lanky stranger. “Because he’s wearing a brand-new Stetson and new shoes, of course,” Quiz explained, as to a child. “Drillers always buy them when their well comes in.” “Trust you to know something like that,” Sandy said in mock admiration. “Well now,” drawled the Farmingtonian when they put their question, “you’d have to get up earlier than this to catch John Hall in town. John keeps his office in his hat. Might as well spend the day seeing the sights, and look him up at his motel when he gets back from the Regions tonight.” “What sights?” asked Sandy when the oilman, obviously a transplanted Texan, had stumped away in high-heeled boots that must have hurt his feet. “Those mountains, maybe? They look close enough to touch. Let’s walk out to them.” “Don’t let this clear, thin air fool you,” Quiz warned. “Those mountains are probably twenty miles away. We’d need a car to—” A great honking and squealing of brakes behind them made the boys jump for safety. As they turned to give the driver what-for, Pepper March stuck his curly head out the window of a new jeep that was towing an equally new aluminum house trailer as big as a barn. “Welcome to our fair city,” Pepper shouted. “Saw you get off the bus, so I prepared a proper reception. How about a guided tour while I run this trailer over to Red’s camp?” “How long have you been here?” Sandy asked as they climbed aboard. “Red flew me over last Friday in his Bonanza. I’ve got the hang of his entire layout already. Nothing to it, really.” As he headed the jeep for the mountains, Pepper kept up a monologue in which skimpy descriptions of the countryside were mixed with large chunks of autobiography. “Every square mile of this desert supports five Indians, fifty sheep, five hundred rattlesnakes and fifty thousand prairie dogs,” he joked as they left the pavement for a winding dirt trail. They bounced madly through clumps of sagebrush, prairie-dog colonies, and tortured hills made of many-colored rock. “These roads wear out a car in a year, and you have to put in new springs every three months,” he added as they hit a chuckhole that made their teeth rattle. “Look at those crazy rock formations,” he said later while the boys sweated and puffed to jack up the rear end of the trailer so it could get around a particularly sharp hairpin turn in the trail. (Now they knew why Pepper had extended his invitation for a tour!) “No telling what minerals you might find if you used electronic exploration methods on scrambled geology like this. Why, only last night, while we were sitting around the campfire at Elbow Rock, I said to Red: ‘Red,’ I said, just like that—we’ve become real pals already, you know—‘Red,’ I said, ‘why don’t we branch out? Why don’t we look for oil as well as uranium, now that we’re out here?’ And Red said to me: ‘Pepper,’ he said—” “‘—when did you get your Ph.D. in geology?’” Sandy cut in. “Nothing like that at all! ‘Pepper,’ he said, ‘you’re right on the electron beam. We’ll organize the Red Pepper Oil Exploration and Contracting Company and give John Hall and those other stick-in-the-muds a run for their money.’ Oops! Hope we didn’t break anything that time!” The 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 “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 answered in a rich contralto voice. “It’s all so wonderful. The oil lease money pouring in like this, after long lean years when starvation for the Navajos was just around the corner and it looked as though their reservation might be taken from them. Schools and hospitals being built all over. My wonderful new trailer with books and maps and even a kitchen and a shower for the children. Oh, my Navajos are going places at last.” She gave an embarrassed laugh at her long speech. “One place your Navajos can go is to Salt Lake City,” Hall growled. “Get the state of Utah to settle that quarrel about who owns the land your schools and hospitals are being built on. Then I can get my hands on some leases up there.” “I thought the Navajo reservation was in New Mexico and Arizona,” Sandy said. “A small part of it is in southern Utah,” Hall explained. “That’s the part bounded by the San Juan River.” “The argument over school lands is less important than our other disputes,” Chief Quail said carefully. He spoke good English but his words seemed to be tied together with string. Plainly, he had learned the white man’s language not many years ago. “The real problem—the one that is, how do you say, tying up millions of dollars of lease money—is to have a correct boundary drawn around the Hopi reservation.” “The chief means,” Hall explained for the boys’ benefit, “that the Navajo reservation forms a large rectangle that completely surrounds a smaller square of land in Arizona where the Hopi Indians live.” “Not a square, Mr. Hall,” Chief Quail objected. “The Hopis really own only a small triangle. Those primitive, stupid cliff dwellers claim thousands of Navajo acres to which they have no right. If I had my way in our Council, I would....” “The Navajos and the Hopis are all grandmothers,” Salmon cut in angrily. “Squabbling over money like palefaces! Spending their royalties on things like schools and hospitals! When my tribe, the southern Utes, got its first royalty check, the Council voted to have some fun with the money. We spent it to build a race track for our fast horses!” “Digger Indian!” The Navajo sneered at Salmon without moving a muscle of his broad face. “Fish eater! Soon you will waste all your easy money. When the oil runs out you will be running about naked again, living on roots and fried caterpillars like you used to!” “Oh, no, John.” The Ute’s grin was just visible in the gathering darkness. “Maybe we’ll go on the warpath and take what we need from you fat Navajo sheep herders, as we did in the good old days. Or—” he added quickly as the chief lunged to his feet—“we’ll sing you to death. Like this!” Salmon began a wailing chant that set everyone’s teeth on edge. The Navajo stopped his advance as if he had struck a wall. He clapped his hands over his ears and, after a moment, stalked out into the night. “You shouldn’t have done that, Ralph,” Hall said coldly. “Some day Chief Quail is going to take you apart if you don’t stop baiting him.” “Can you actually sing people to death, Mr. Salmon?” Sandy said to break the tension. “Of course not,” the Ute answered softly. “But the chief thinks I can, and I wouldn’t spoil his belief for anything. We have a set-to like this every time we meet. Some of our medicine men can sing people well, though. They chant awhile and then pull the pain right out of your tooth, ear, or stomach.” “What does a pain look like?” Quiz asked, half convinced. “Looks just like a fingernail about two inches long,” the Ute answered. “It’s bright red. If you strike it, it goes tinnnggg, like the reed of a saxophone.” “Stop your nonsense, Ralph,” White commanded, “while I go out and smooth Quail’s ruffled feathers.” He followed the chief and brought him back five minutes later to receive an oily apology from his ancestral enemy. “You Indians will be broke again, one of these days, if you keep quarreling among yourselves,” Hall said then. “Crooked white men are hanging around the Four Corners. They’re just waiting for something like that so they can trick you out of your oil and uranium rights, or even your reservations.” Everyone had to agree that this was true, so the little party settled down in reasonable harmony to watch the giant stars come out. Salmon produced a guitar after a while. Then he and Kitty sang Indian and Mexican songs together. Sandy particularly liked one that went: I wander with the pollen of dawn upon my trail. Beauty surrounding me, with it I wander. “That’s a Navajo song,” the Ute said, grinning. “We sing it in honor of Chief Quail. Here’s one by a white man that I like: MaÑana is a lovely word we all would like to borrow. It means ‘Don’t skeen no wolfs today wheech you don’t shoot tomorrow.’ An’ eef you got some jobs to did, of which you do not wanna, Go ’head and take siesta now; tomorrow ees maÑana!” “Guess that’s a hint we’d better take our siestas,” Hall said to the boys. “Big day ahead maÑana.” “This country sort of grows on one,” Sandy said to Kitty as they shook hands. “I’m beginning to feel at home already.” “Oh, you haven’t really seen anything yet,” the girl answered. “If you and Mr. Taylor get up in the neighborhood of my school, look me up. I’ll show you some of the wildest and most beautiful country on earth.” “Mother said I’d fall in love with the place.” Sandy took a last look across the sleeping desert. “She was born not far from here. Met my father when he was working for the U.S. Geological Survey.” “How interesting,” cried the girl. “Maybe my folks know her. What was her maiden name?” “It was Ruth Carson.” “Oh!” Kitty snatched her hand out of his. “She’s related to Kit Carson, isn’t she?” “The general was my great-uncle,” Sandy said proudly. “That’s why I’m so interested in this part of—” He stopped because Kitty had backed away from him until her back pressed against the motel wall. As he stared, she spat into the dust of the patio in a most unladylike fashion before turning and running toward her room. “What did I do to her?” Sandy gasped, openmouthed. “Kitty’s mother is a Navajo,” Chief Quail answered. “Back in Civil War days, Kit Carson rounded up the Navajos to take us away from our reservation. We went on the warpath and retreated into the mountains. Carson followed. His soldiers shot several dozen of us, and slaughtered all our sheep so we would either have to surrender or starve. Even today, many of us would rather eat fish as the Utes do than touch one of Kit Carson’s descendants!” He turned his back and marched off. “Ouch!” Sandy groaned. “I certainly put my foot into it that time.” “Don’t worry too much about it,” said White. “Fact of the matter is that Kit Carson made a mighty good Indian Agent later on, and most Navajos admit it. He was the man who insisted that they all be returned to the reservation after the rebellion was over. He eventually died from overwork in behalf of ‘his Indians.’ Except for a few diehards, the Navajos won’t hold your mother’s name against you.” “I certainly hope you’re right,” Sandy sighed as he and Quiz said good night to the others and headed for their room. “What a mess,” his friend said. “Navajos squabbling with Utes, Hopis and the state of Utah. Crooks waiting to take advantage of them all. Pains like fingernails! Cavalry heroes who turn into villains. I suppose that’s why the biggest oil field in the Four Corners is called the Paradox Basin!” |
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