He wore a green-and-white
roughneck sweater broadly striped, and the blue overalls that inevitably
follow American civilization into the wild places.
"'S hot day," he announced unemotionally, and took the paper which the
red-blanketed one held out to him. His air of condescension could not hide the
fact that behind his pride at being able to read print he was unhappily aware
also of his limitations in the accomplishment. Along the scare-head Luck had
indicated, his dirty forefinger moved slowly while he spelled out the words.
"A-a-bank rob!" he read triumphantly, and repeated the statement in Spanish.
After that he mumbled. a good deal of it, the longer words arresting his
finger while he struggled with the syllables. But he got the sense of it
nevertheless, as Luck and Miguel knew by the version he gave in Spanish to the
old Indian, with now and then a Navajo word to help out.
When he came to the place where Ramon Chavez and Luis Rojas were named as the
thieves, he gavea grunt and looked up at Luck and Miguel, read in, their faces
that these were the men they sought, and grinned.
"Me, I know them feller," he declared unexpectedly. "Dat day I seen them
feller.
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