'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.

He marked the camp where their horses had been stolen from them and
told how long they had waited there until the horses of their own accord
returned to camp; thirteen horses, he explained to the old Navajo. He
drew a rough square to indicate the square butte, sketched the fork of
the trail there and told how four men had turned to the north on a false
trail, while he and four others had gone around the southern end of the
hill. He calmly made plain that at the end of both false trails a trap
had been laid, that Indians had fired upon white men and for no just
cause. Why was this go? Why had Indians surrounded them back there in
the grove and tried to kill them? Why were Indians shooting at them from
the ledge of rocks that circled this little basin? They had no quarrel
with the Navajos. They were chasing thieves, to take them to jail.

Folded swelteringly in his red blanket the old Indian sat humped forward
a little, smoking slowly his cigarette and studying the sketch Luck had
drawn for him. With aching head and parched throat and hungry stomach,
Luck sat cross-legged on the hot sand and waited, and would not let his
face betray any emotion at all. Up on the Tim-rock brown faces peered
down steadfastly at the pow-wow. And back among the rocks and bushes
the Happy Family waited restively with eyes turning in all directions
guarding against treachery; and Lite, whose bullets always went straight