“I can’t understand it,” said Donovan. “So far as I can tell, he has no internal injuries. But the life is running out of him like water out of a sack. I’m afraid he may be dying.”
“He is dying,” Ralph spoke up softly. “I’ve been listening to his ravings. He thinks he has offended the water spirits by even talking to palefaces and a Navajo and a Ute about the tribe’s sacred boundary line. He thinks he must die to make his peace with the spirits. And so, he will die before the night is out.”
“Hosteen Quail,” said Hall, “Navajo chiefs are medicine men as well, aren’t they? Can’t you paint a sand picture or something, and cure Pony-tooth of his delusion?”
“No,” the Chief answered sadly. “Navajo magic works only for Navajos.”
“Let me try,” Ralph said suddenly. He gripped the Hopi’s shoulder to get his dazed attention, and spoke to him for a long time in Shoshonean.
The old man shook his head back and forth in disagreement, but he stopped picking at the moth-eaten buffalo robe which Donovan had thrown over him.
“I told him that the water spirits were not angry,” the Ute said at last. “He said I lied. I told him we are all his friends. He said to prove it. So I told him I would prove it by singing him well.” Ralph stood up slowly and paced around the fire three times in a counterclockwise direction. “My father was a medicine man,” he went on. “As a boy I watched him sing people well, but I never was allowed to try it, of course… Well, here goes… Wish me luck, Hosteen Quail.”
He leaned his head back against the ruined pueblo wall for a moment, as though gathering strength from the ancient building. Then he began to sing in his rich baritone.
At first the chant went slowly, slowly, like the beat of buffalo hoofs on the open prairie. Then, as Sandy held his breath to listen, the rhythm became faster. The words meant nothing to the boy, but somehow they painted pictures in his mind: A wild charge of naked Indian horsemen, dying in a hopeless effort to capture a fort from which white rifle smoke wreathed. The thundering rapids of some great northern river. Chirping of tree toads in the spring. A love song on some distant mesa. A bird call. The silence of a summer night…
“There!” Ralph whispered at last, his broad face dripping sweat.
He reached under Ponytooth’s robe and fumbled there for several moments. Almost, he seemed to be withdrawing some object from the old man’s body—something red and wet—like a fingernail!
The Hopi gave a long sigh. “Frens,” he murmured as he sank into peaceful slumber.
“He’ll be all right now,” said the Ute, “providing we take him to the hospital at Lukachukai quick to get that compound fracture fixed.”
He stumbled out into the darkness, which now was spangled with stars.
Her eyes round with faith and wonder, the little brown woman followed him. She was carrying a pot of steaming coffee.
* * * *
The less said about that awful midnight drive to Lukachukai, the better. Hall got them there somehow, while Chief Quail and Ralph held Pony tooth in their arms during the entire journey to protect his leg.
Then they had to go all the way back to Chinle for the jeep, but not before Chief Quail had made a detour to toss a piece of yellow carnotite ore on the wishing pile which stood near the entrance to Canyon de Chelly.
“It’s not that I like Hopis any better than I do Utes,” he said shamefacedly. “It’s just that I want Ponytooth’s leg to get well quick so we can settle the boundary dispute.”
“Well, here, I’ll chuck something on your silly pile, too.” Ralph twisted a ring off his finger and tossed it onto the big mound of stones. “Me Boy Scout. Always do good turn.” But he turned away so the others couldn’t see his face.
They got a few hours’ sleep at Thunderbird, but a much-relayed telegram dragged them out of bed before sunup. It was from Jack Boyd, the diesel engine man at the well, and it read:
SHE’S ACTING UP STOP HAVE HER STUFFED FULL OF MUD STOP HURRY
More dead than alive, they pulled onto Hall’s property to find that things had calmed down. Drilling was proceeding as usual, in fact, and Boyd was covered with embarrassment.
As Ralph and Sandy stood outside the bunk trailer, almost too tired to go in and take their clothes off, the driller said lazily, “See that big mountain there to the north? What does it remind you of?”
Sandy blinked the sleep out of his eyes and stared. The mountain in question had a big round cliff at one end, a long high ridge in its center, two branching ridges farther along, and sharply pointed cliffs at its other end.
“Why,” he said at last, “it looks like a man lying on his back.”
“Good boy. That’s what it is.” Ralph grinned. “That mountain is called the Sleeping Ute. It’s supposed to be a great warrior who will awake some day, to unite all the Indians… And do you know what?”
“What?” Sandy yawned mightily.
“I thought I saw his big toe wiggle just a minute ago.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cavanaugh Shows His Colors
Long before sunup, the screaming of a siren on the rig brought off-duty crewmen pouring out of their bunks in all stages of undress. When Sandy arrived at the brightly lighted well, the night foreman was already halfway through his report to Hall, Salmon and Donovan.
“She started rumblin’ an’ kickin’ at the drill-pipe just like she did yesterday.” The fat, oil-smeared man was puffing. “I stepped up the mud pressure an’ pulled the siren. She’s calmed down now, but the blowout preventers are having all they can do to hold her.”
“Good boy,” said Hall. “If you had pulled the siren and waited for orders we might have a gusher on our hands and pieces of derrick flying in all directions. How far down are we?”
“Little over 5,500 feet, last time I checked.”
“That’s the Gallup Pay.” Donovan was dancing with excitement. “I knew we’d hit it. Let’s take a sample and see what we’ve got.”
The big old diesel roared for a moment. It dragged a bar of iron called a “kelly” out of the square hole in the turntable until the top of the first section of drillpipe appeared.
After the pipe had been securely locked in the turntable so that it could neither fall back into the well nor shoot upward if the underground pressure increased suddenly, two floormen clamped their six-foot-long tongs, or monkey wrenches, around the kelly and unscrewed it from the pipe with great care.
They had eased it off only two or three turns when a frothy mixture with the foul odor of rotten eggs began to squirt from between kelly and pipe.
Donovan caught some of this in his cupped hands. He smelled it, rubbed it between his fingers and then tasted it.
“Beautiful!” the geologist crooned. “This is good, high-gravity oil. The sulphur content is high, as you can smell, but refiners know how to take that out. I’ll tell you more when I’ve run a full analysis, but it sure looks as if we’ve licked the law of averages. Two flowing wells in two tries is ’way above par.”
The crewmen, who had been holding their breaths for his verdict, let out wild rebel yells and spun their battered hats into the air. Jack Boyd and the night foreman hoisted Hall on their shoulders and marched him around the derrick in triumph.
“All right, fellows,” the oilman shouted to stop the riot. “You all get new hats, new shoes and bonuses!” As they started another cheer he mounted the drill platform and