Presently Juan's Stetson appeared above
the ledge, and Juan himself scrambled hastily down the rift and came to them,
grinning with his lips and showing a row of beautifully even teeth, and asking
suspicious questions with his black eyes that shone through narrowed lids.
Miguel, arriving just then from the opposite direction, sized him up with one
heavy-lashed glance and nodded negligently. He had left his rifle behind him
as he had been told, but his six-shooter hung inside the waistband of his
trousers where he could grip it with a single drop of his hand. The Native
Son, lazy as he looked, was not taking any chances.
The old Indian explained in Navajo to the young man who eyed the two white men
while,he listened. Of the blanket-vending, depot-haunting type was this young
man, with a ready smile and a quick eye for a bargain and a smattering of
English learned in his youth at a mission, and a larger vocabulary of Mexican
that lent him fluency of speech when the mood to talk was on him. Half of his
hair was cut so that it hung even with his ear-lobes. At the back it was long
and looped up in the way a horse's tail is looped in muddy weather, and tied
with a grimy red ribbon wound round and round it.
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