me 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. 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 gave a 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. They go--"

The old Indian touched him on the shoulder, and Juan turned and
repeated the statement in Spanish. The old man's eyes went to luck
understandingly