located oil-containing faults and stratigraphic traps with my detector
where all other instruments had failed. You’re just old-fashioned.”
“Maybe I am,” said Donovan, “and then maybe I just don’t like to have
wool pulled over my eyes, or the eyes of men I consider to be my
friends.”
“I’m not pulling wool. Halos or circles of radiation can be detected on
the surface of the earth around the edges of every oil deposit. That’s a
proven fact.” Cavanaugh pounded on the arm of his chair with a fist as
big as a ham.
“Is it?” Donovan asked gently. “Jakosky, who is an authority on
exploration geophysics, says, and I quote his exact words: ‘Atomic
exploration is still in its infancy.’ Let me tell you a story:
“Back in the early days of the oil business, a number of people made
fortunes by charging big fees to locate petroleum deposits with the help
of split willow wands. They’d walk around with the split ends of the
wands between their hands until, they said, some mysterious force pulled
the big end downward until it pointed to oil. A man who helped Colonel
Drake promote his original oil well at Titusville, Pennsylvania, back in
1859, actually located several profitable fields with the ‘help’ of a
spiritualist medium.”
“He could hardly have failed,” one of the onlookers spoke up. “In those
days, oil was literally bursting out of the ground along many
Pennsylvania creek beds.”
“That’s right, Tom,” Donovan agreed. “Oil was everywhere, so those
dowsers, or ‘creekologists’ as they often were called, did very well
until the search for oil moved west where deposits were scarcer and much
deeper underground.
“Around 1913, geologists had to be called in to do the exploration.
They’ve been responsible for finding practically all the fields
discovered since then. But the creekologists didn’t give up easily. They
built pseudo-scientific gadgets called doodlebugs and equipped them with
lots of fancy dials and flashing lights. One doodlebug even had a
phonograph in it. As it was carried across a field, a ghostly voice
would be heard saying, ‘Your sainted Aunt Minnie bids me tell you to
drill right here and you will bring in a second Spindletop.’”
“You can’t call me a crook!” Cavanaugh, his face scarlet with rage,
lunged to his feet and advanced on his tormentor.
“I’m not calling you a crook—yet.” Donovan stood up too, knocked out his
pipe and put it into his pants pocket. “If you would just stop making
all of those wild-eyed claims for your detector, though, you would make
out better out here.”
As Cavanaugh continued to advance he added mildly, “I suppose I ought to
warn you that I studied judo when I was in college.”
“Excuse me for interrupting your fun, gentlemen,” a quiet voice broke
in. “Is there anyone here named Quincy Taylor? An urgent telegram for
him was just relayed down from Farmington.” Kenneth White, the Indian
Agent, stood in the motel doorway holding a yellow envelope.
Nobody answered for a moment, but Cavanaugh took the opportunity to
stomp out of the room while Donovan sat down quietly and started stoking
his pipe.
“Hey, Quiz!” Sandy exploded at last. “Don’t you recognize your own name?
It’s for you!”
His friend blushed with embarrassment as he accepted the wire, but his
round face turned pale as he read it.
“Mr. Hall,” he choked at last. “It’s from Dad. He slipped and broke his
leg in two places. I’m to come home immediately and run the restaurant
while he’s laid up. Gee whiz!” He bit his lips to keep back the tears.
“That’s tough, Quiz.” The oilman came over and slipped a fatherly arm
around the boy’s shoulders. “Your father will be all right soon, I’m
sure, but we certainly will miss you up at the well. Now the problem is
to get you back to Farmington quick so you can catch the midnight bus.
I’ll send your things on, soon as we get back.”
“One of my trucks is returning to Farmington after supper,” spoke up the
oilman named Tom. “You can go in that.”
“Thanks,” gulped Quiz.
The ban about talking at mealtime was broken that night. All the oil and
uranium men were agreed that Cavanaugh was a bad-mannered blusterer, but
they differed sharply about the value of his electronic detector.
“He has made several good uranium strikes with the thing,” a bearded
prospector insisted, “though what good they’re going to do him I can’t
imagine, with the government not buying except from established mills.
But don’t sell Red Cavanaugh short. He has made millions out of
electronics, they say. He knows electronics. He’s a smart operator. You
keep an eye on the bids he makes tomorrow and you’ll see what I mean.”
“Well, I’m not throwing my seismograph away for a while yet,” Tom
retorted. “I’ll put my money on Don’s opinion any day.”
The boys tried to follow the conversation, but Quiz’s heart was not in
it, and he only picked at his food. Finally he excused himself and
headed for the dining-room door with Sandy after him.
“It’s a tough break,” he said half an hour later while he and his pal
stood at the edge of town and stared upward at that amazing natural
bridge called the Window Rock.
“It sure is,” Sandy agreed glumly. “Maybe you can come back, though.”
“Not a chance. Dad will be laid up most of the summer, and he can’t
afford to hire a manager, the way things are. There’s nothing I can—
Hey! Look!” He grabbed Sandy’s arm and pointed. “See that point of light
twinkling ’way up on top of the Window Rock? That isn’t a star, is it?”
“Nuh-uh!” Sandy watched the faint flicker a thousand feet above them.
“That must be where Cavanaugh has pitched his camp. He’s sending a
message of some kind over light beam. If it were a heliograph
transmitting in Morse code I could read it. But that’s a modulated
beam.... Say, we’d better be moseying back to the motel. Must be about
time for your truck to leave.”
“Sandy,” Quiz said half an hour later after they had shaken hands
solemnly, “I’m going to do everything I can, when I get home, to do some
detective work on Cavanaugh. If anything turns up, I’ll let you know
quick.”
“Do that, Quiz.” Sandy swallowed and his voice broke. “Be seeing you.”
Quiz climbed slowly into the cab of the big tool truck. As it roared off
into the starlit desert night he kept waving a forlorn farewell.
CHAPTER SIX
Cliff Dweller Country
Sandy had expected that the opening of bids for leases on thousands of
acres in the Navajo reservation would be an exciting occasion, something
like a country auction. Instead, he found it a great bore.
Scores of bidders in their shirt sleeves lounged on hard straight-backed
chairs in the stuffy meeting room of the Indian Service building, or
chatted, smoked and told jokes in the corridors. Kenneth White and other
representatives of the Indian Service sat behind a long redwood table,
opened piles of envelopes, compared bids, held long whispered
conferences with grave, leather-faced members of the Navajo Council and
their advisers, and very occasionally handed down decisions.
“The bid of $3,900 per acre made for 200 Navajo acres in San Juan
County, northeast, southeast of Section 27-24 N-8 is accepted,” White
then would drone. Or: “A bid of $318 per acre for 125 acres of Section
18, 42 north, 30 east is rejected by the Council because it’s too low.
Another bid may be made at the August meeting, if desired.”
After an hour of this, Sandy was counting the cracks in the floor,
watching flies buzzing against the windowpanes, and wondering whether he
dared ask Mr. Hall to be excused. He hesitated about doing this because
the oilman was following the bidding with tense interest and making
endless notes on the backs of old envelopes that he kept dragging out of
his vest pockets.
“Ssst!” Ralph whispered from the seat behind him. “This is murder. How
about having a second breakfast with me?
“We never should have come down here this month when our well needs
watching every minute,” the young Indian added after they had entered a
nearly empty diner and ordered ham and eggs which neither of them really
wanted. “The big companies have the big money, so they’ll gobble up the
best of the acreage, as usual. We poor boys will get some small tracts,
if we’re lucky. And I don’t think John Hall’s outfit is going to be
lucky today.”
“Why is that?” Sandy asked.
“Because most of our bids are for land that’s under dispute between the
Navajos and Hopis. They can’t be accepted until some sort of settlement
is reached between the tribes. I don’t know why John keeps putting them
in. Well—” Ralph finished his coffee and slid off the stool and onto his
feet in one motion, like a big cat—“let’s go back and learn the worst.”
There was a strange tenseness in the meeting room when they entered.
Cavanaugh and White were standing facing each other across the table.
All eyes were riveted on them and not a sound was being made by the
onlookers.
“Mr. Cavanaugh,” the Indian Agent was saying, “neither the Service nor
the Council can understand the meaning of the bids you have submitted.
Some of them are for small tracts around the Pinta Dome area in Apache
country where there has never been the slightest show of uranium-bearing
ore. I don’t want to tell you your business, but....”
“Thank you for that, Mr. White,” the redhaired giant growled. “Let the
bids stand.”
“Very well. They are accepted. But this other bid—for a thousand acres
in the bed of the San Juan River. You must have made an error. It is
submitted directly to the United States government, instead of to the
Navajo Council. Do you wish to correct it?”
“I do not,” snapped Cavanaugh.
“But it cannot be accepted, since the stream is not navigable.”
“I challenge that statement, Mr. White. Under the law it cannot be
rejected until the stream is _proved_ not to be navigable. If you won’t
accept it, let it stand as a prior claim. Is there anything else?”
“Nothing else whatsoever,” White answered mildly, but between stiff
lips.
“That suits me fine.” Cavanaugh lit a long black cigar in defiance of a
NO SMOKING sign, and strutted out. All heads turned to watch him go and
a buzz of conversation started.
“Wheeuw!” Ralph said in Sandy’s ear. “That Pinta Dome area had a big
helium strike some years back. Wells in that region are all closed in
now, and the government is very hush-hush about the whole thing. What’s
Cavanaugh up to?”
White picked up another bunch of bids and called Hall to the table.
“You know, John, that bids on land in the disputed Navajo-Hopi area
can’t be accepted. I’ve told you so again and again. So has Chairman
Paul Jones of the Navajo Council. Why do you keep submitting them?”
“Because I’m a stubborn man, Ken.” Hall grinned, tilting his gray head
as he always did when he was being stubborn. “And because I think
there’s oil under those lands. And because I also think the tribes will
get together soon. You just let my bids stand and tell me where I can
locate Jones.”
“Hosteen Sandez, do you know where Mr. Jones is today?” White asked a
lean old Indian who sat next to him.
“Gone to Chinle,” was the reply. “Two families there having dispute—with
shotguns—about irrigation water. He trying to settle it before Navajo
police come.”
“Thank you,” said Hall. “I think we’ll just mosey on up Chinle way.”
The jeep followed a good paved road as far west as Ganado, but when it
turned north toward Chinle it got back once more on a trail made of
stones from which none of the corners had been removed. They were
driving through a wild country of mesas, washes and canyons which made
conversation almost impossible.
“What do you expect to gain by talking to Jones, John?” Donovan asked
once when the road became smoother for a few miles.
“I’ve been reading so much about summit conferences,” Hall answered,
“that it just occurred to me we might set one up out here. I want to
suggest to Jones that we get some of the more important chiefs of the
two tribes to meet out here in the desert somewhere, where there are no
reporters or members of the Land Resources Association hanging around.
I’ll bet we could accomplish something.”
“Good idea,” Donovan agreed. “If the tribes weren’t continually stirred
up by white men with axes to grind they’d soon be able to agree on that
boundary line.”
“Don’t mind me, palefaces,” said Ralph as he spun the wheel to avoid a
particularly hard-looking stone. “But I doubt it. I know both tribes,
and....”
Crash! The jeep bucked like a pinto pony and the motor roared.
“There goes the second muffler in three months,” Ralph shouted, pointing
backward to a heap of junk on the trail.
After that, all conversation was impossible until they pulled into the
little town of Chinle—and learned at the trading post that Jones had
already departed for Tuba City!
“Say, John,” Ralph said, as they were standing around waiting for a
“shade tree mechanic” to dig a muffler that would fit out of a rusty
pile of spare parts that leaned against his hogan, “we can’t possibly
drive back to the well tonight. Why don’t we put up at the Canyon de
Chelly camp so I can show Sandy where his great-uncle fit the Navajos?”
“Good idea,” said his employer. “You’ll have time to show Sandy the
cliff dwellings tomorrow, too. Chief Quail lives over in the Canyon de
Chelly neighborhood. I want to sound him out on my idea for a summit
conference.”
The sun was sinking in golden glory behind thousand-foot-high red
sandstone buttes when they drove up to the Thunderbird guest ranch at
the entrance of the Canyon de Chelly National Monument area. There they
obtained two pleasant double rooms furnished after the rugged style of
the Old West. When they had showered most of the dust off themselves,
they gathered for a fine meal in the timbered mess hall. Then, in the
cool of the mountain evening, they went over to a big campfire where a
National Park Service Ranger was lecturing to a group of tourists.
“These canyons housed one of the great centers of the Anasazi, or Basket
Maker, civilization,” the Ranger was explaining. “During the first
several centuries of what we call the Christian era, Basket Makers
occupied the whole drainage basin of the San Juan River. In addition to
baskets, they made fine pottery and woven sandals, but they used dart
throwers instead of the later bows and arrows. They built peculiar
circular homes with floors sunk a foot or more into the ground. You’ll
see one of those tomorrow when you visit Mummy Cave.
“When the Basket Makers vanished early in the eighth century, Pueblo
Indians occupied the canyons. They built many-storied cliff dwellings
over the old caves. They were farmers, but they also made beautiful
pottery, cloth, stone tools, and ornaments of copper and gold.
“Coronado, the Spanish Conquistador, may have been looking for this
place when he came up from Mexico in 1540 to search for the fabulous
riches of El Dorado and the Seven Cities of Cibola. He never found
anything but thirst and death.”
“Were the Pueblos and Basket Makers related?” someone asked.
“Yes, they were both Shoshones, like the modern Hopis,” answered the
Ranger as he threw more wood on the fire.
“More distinguished ancestors for us Utes,” Ralph whispered to Sandy.
“Seven or eight centuries ago,” the Ranger went on, “the Pueblos grouped
their cliff dwellings into large ‘apartment houses’ situated on sites
that could easily be defended. Tomorrow you’ll visit White House,
Antelope House, and Standing Cow, which are their finest structures. Let
me warn you, though, that only people accustomed to conditions in the
canyons should drive cars into them. The spring rains are late this
year. There is very grave danger from flash floods and quicksand. In
past years, many covered wagons and other vehicles drove into the
canyons, got caught in a sudden storm, and were never found. I suggest
you rent a car and guide from the Thunderbird Ranch operator.”
“What became of the Pueblos?” a tourist asked in an awed voice.
“Nobody knows. Some people think a great drought hit this part of the
country and they had to move to an area where there was more rainfall.
Others believe that an enemy—possibly the fierce Aztecs—came up from
Mexico and killed all the inhabitants. Terrible battles were fought
here, we know, before the end. Sometimes Pueblo mummies with weapons
still in their hands are found when a new cliff dwelling is explored.
The Navajos say the whole place was deserted when they moved in, more
than 200 years ago. Now, I want to tell you about the troubles that
_they_ had with the Spaniards and Kit Carson.”
“We’d better go to bed, I think,” Hall said to the others in his group.
“Ralph knows a lot more about recent history than this fellow does.
He’ll tell you all about it in the morning.”
Sandy and Ralph crawled out of their bunks shortly after sunrise, but
they found that Hall had already departed. A note under their door read:
“Have located Chief Quail. Don and I have him cornered and are trying to
talk him over to our side. You can use the jeep to explore the canyons
this morning but be back by lunchtime, so we can hunt for Hopi Chief
Ponytooth. He’s up in this neighborhood, Chief Quail says. Happy
cliff-hanging.”
After a brief argument with the Ranger, who repeated his warnings about
flash floods and quicksand, Sandy and Ralph got under way.
“I know this territory like the palm of my hand,” the driller said as he
drove carefully into dark gorges where the sun shone only around noon.
“There really are four separate canyons, you’ll notice. From right to
left they’re Monument Canyon, the Canyon de Chelly proper, Black Rock,
and the famous Canyon del Muerto, which means Death Canyon. That’s the
one where the Navajos made their last stand against Kit Carson.”
“How did he ever drive them out of a place like this?” Sandy marveled as
he stared up at towering cliffs that rose almost straight up from the
grass-covered canyon floor. “One man on a cliff should have been able to
stand off a regiment by rolling rocks down on their heads.”
“That’s where your great-uncle was smarter than General Custer,”
answered his guide. “He didn’t try to attack. If he had, the Navajos
would have massacred his troops. Instead, Kit sent small raiding parties
of cavalrymen down the centers of the canyons where they were fairly
safe from rocks and arrows. They had orders to shoot every sheep, goat
and cow in sight. After they did that, they retreated and blocked all
exits to the canyons.”
“And the braves and their families just stayed inside and starved?”
Sandy was really shocked.
“What else could they do? See that big blue-and-white picture of a cow
drawn on the canyon wall over the cliff dwelling to your left? That’s a
sort of monument which the poor old Navajos made to remind them of their
slaughtered herds. After they finished it, they all came out and
surrendered.”
“Gee whiz!” was all that Sandy could think of to say.
“We have time to explore just one cliff house,” Ralph continued. “It
might as well be Standing Cow. Come on.”
They climbed a swaying ladder to reach one of the dwellings. This had
been restored by archaeologists and looked as though its Indian
inhabitants had departed the night before, instead of a long 400 years
ago. There was the loom on which they had woven their cloth. Graceful
pottery with decorations in glaze was stacked in a corner. A bedboard
rested on two timbers cemented into the rear wall.
“These were de luxe apartments, probably occupied by the chief,” Ralph
explained. “They have one big drawback—no hallways. You have to go
through the living quarters to get to the other rooms. Come back here
and I’ll show you one of their kivas, or ceremonial rooms.”
He led the way into a much larger cave that had a balcony overlooking a
round hole some twenty feet across by six feet deep. Light filtered into
the gloomy place through one small window in the cliff face.
The driller turned a flashlight beam into the hole. Sandy saw that its
bottom could be reached by steep stone stairways. A wide bench ran
around the sides of this strange pit. In its center stood several stone
tanks about the size of bathtubs.
“When the cliff dwellers wanted to talk to their gods,” said Ralph,
“they climbed down into a kiva hole like this and stayed for days
without eating, drinking or sleeping. They practiced a kind of
self-hypnotism, I guess.”
“Maybe,” Sandy guessed, “they just went down there to take their
Saturday-night baths. I don’t see any gods—idols, I mean.”
“These people didn’t have idols—just those tub things,” Ralph answered.
For a long time he stood staring down into the kiva, as though he were
trying to picture his dead-and-forgotten ancestors there, conducting
their silent worship. “We’d better be getting back to the ranch,” he
said at last, shaking his handsome head as though to clear it of dreams.
“That was a pretty grim thing Carson did to the Indians,” Sandy said as
they drove back to Thunderbird.
“It was better than a massacre. Only twenty or so Navajos were actually
killed by his troops, remember. And you should not forget, either, that
Kit was acting under orders from Washington.”
“Those Nazi officers who killed innocent people in German concentration
camps said they were acting under orders too,” Sandy pointed out grimly.
“Oh, but Carson never tried to excuse his actions. At first, he thought
he was doing the right thing to move the tribe onto a fine new
reservation. But as soon as he had herded several thousand of them over
to Bosque Redondo on the Pecos River, he changed his mind. Bosque
Redondo means Round Forest in Spanish, but he found there weren’t more
than half a dozen trees on the whole place, while good grazing grass was
almost as rare. It was a hellhole and the Navajos hated it. They ran
away or, if they weren’t able to do that, they just sat down and pined.
A thousand of them died there from hunger and homesickness.
“So Carson climbed on a train, went to Washington, and told the Great
White Father just what was happening. When he warned that all the
Navajos at Bosque Redondo would be dead in a few years, nobody seemed to
mind very much. ‘Good Indian: dead Indian,’ you know. When he added that
the government was spending a million dollars a year just to help them
die, a few ears pricked up. But when he said that half the Navajos had
never left Arizona and that they were threatening to go on the warpath
to help their imprisoned brothers, Carson got action. He was ordered to
return the tribe to its original reservation—this one—and was given
money to help them get a new start.”
“I’d like to tell Miss Gonzales what you just told me,” said Sandy. “I
don’t want her to dislike me because she thinks my great-uncle was a
monster.”
“Well, why don’t you? Her school trailer is located only about twenty
miles from our well. Drop in on her when you get a day off.”
“Gee, I’d like to, Ralph,” said Sandy as they approached the ranch gate
where Hall, Donovan and Chief Quail were waiting for them, “but she
seemed pretty angry that night at the motel.”
“Kitty’s a fine girl,” Ralph answered slowly, “even though she tries to
be more Navajo than the Navajos. Fact is, I’ll let you in on a secret:
My last oil royalty check from the wells in the Southern Ute reservation
amounted to $12,000. When I get a few more of them in my bank account,
so I can give her a big marriage gift, I’m going to ask my uncle to ask
_her_ uncle if she’ll have me for a husband.”
“What have uncles got to do with marriage?” Sandy stared at Ralph in
amazement, realizing for the first time that he really was an Indian and
had ways of doing things that were hard to understand.
“It’s just an old Navajo custom.” Ralph grinned uncomfortably. “And that
reminds me: If Kitty gets uppity about Carson again, you tell her I said
to be nice or I’ll ask my great-uncle to step on her great-uncle’s
shadow. That will make her behave!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Back of Beyond
After a hurried lunch that ended with flabby apple pie, as Sandy had
discovered most lunches usually did in the Southwest, the five men
climbed into Quail’s pickup truck. (The Chief insisted that the jeep
couldn’t possibly travel the trails they would have to follow.) Then
they set out for the wild Dot Klish Canyon area, to the northwest of
Chinle, where the Navajo thought Chief Ponytooth and his wife were
“squatting,” as he put it.
Ralph chose to sit on a box in the bed of the truck because, as he said
frankly, “If I’m in the cab with the Chief, we’ll quarrel.”