You would not have
surmised that his stomach was gnawing at his nerves, sending out insistently
the call for food; or that his thirst tormented him; or that the combination
of hunger, heat, thirst and mental strain had bred a jumping headache that was
knotting the veins in his temples. All these nagging miseries beset him--but
he knew the ways of the Indians and he meant to impress this old man first of
all with his plains-Indian training; so he schooled himself to patience.
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 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.
Pages:
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251