One Indian spoke in a guttural dialect, and a shrill voice responded from up ahead:
“So they’re awake now? Good! Igo, you take the wheel.”
One Indian moved forward. Moments later, a scrawny man with a crafty, wizened face beneath a shock of whitish hair, stepped into sight. To the other Indian, he piped:
“Ubi, you stay here. You help me watch.”
Then, tilting his head in birdlike fashion, the white-haired man studied the prisoners and demanded:
“What were you two doing around that boathouse?”
Mr. Brewster kept his lips tightly closed, his eyes staring straight back toward the frothy wake from the cruiser’s propeller. Biff, too, ignored the question.
“Maybe you’d talk if I gave you a drink of water,” the scrawny man suggested, “and maybe I ought to toss you in that big drink out there”—he gestured toward the river—“and let you try to swim ashore. You wouldn’t get far, tied like that.”
The stolid silence of the Brewsters annoyed the white-haired man. His voice rose to a still higher pitch:
“I mean it, every word of it! I’ll find a way to make you talk, as sure as my name is Joe Nara!”