Afterwards they started home, a long silent ride that was uninterrupted except for a short visit to Tesuque. They were too tired to take much interest in Tesuque, which after all was just another Indian village. Of course, there was old Teofilo. Teofilo was a great help with his professional attitude of glad-hander; he greeted all couriers with the same glad surprise, although he saw at least one a day, and he was more than willing to show his scarred head, which had once been scalped. He loved to have his picture taken.
Then, the rest of the way was quiet. The dudes arranged their cameras in their laps, peered around at the bigger pots stored in the back of the bus, and settled down to doze. The afternoon waned and the shadows lengthened across the road and the mountains darkened. In town, Curly manipulated the bus through the narrow streets and stopped before the Palace of the Governors, now a museum.
“We stop here to see the Museum,” Gin shouted through the bus. “Indian relics and paintings and the chair Lew Wallace wrote ‘Ben Hur’ in. Afterwards we walk back to the hotel.”
“Good-bye,” said Blake suddenly, and climbed out. Off across the Plaza he sprinted; he could be seen intercepting Teddy Madden just as he was going into the drug store. Gin looked after them and wondered if Teddy had made any attempt to call her that morning. Perhaps she had better call him and remind him that they had a date. He was so forgetful. Mechanically she ushered the dudes into the Palace, then to the first room on the right.
“Now, here we have a model of the place we saw yesterday. See, here’s the ruined church....”
But if she called Teddy, Harvey would answer the phone and might think that she had called to speak to him. Had she a good enough excuse for calling Teddy? Was she justified in assuming that they were good enough friends? Oh, to hell with that. There was no reason why she shouldn’t call him.
“This is the Frijoles room. Frijoles is one of the places we have for private tours. It is very lovely and very famous: it’s all excavated. We take it in one-day trips or two: there’s a hotel with cabins for rooms. It’s most interesting. It has cave-dwellings similar to what we saw today, but they’re in the walls of the canyon instead of being on a cliff. There’s a little model of the kiva; see, like the ceremonial cave we saw today.”
With a guilty feeling, she came back to the business in hand and listened to herself talking like a Victrola. That was no way to act. One must put oneself over. Mr. Butts was looking at the pictures on the walls with a thoughtful eye, a competitive eye. She smiled at him, glowing with all the force of her personality.
“I’ll tell you what effect that has on me, Mr. Butts,” she said confidentially. “When I stand there in that canyon I get the queerest feeling.” It was true, that was the worst of all, she thought. The idea of telling him! “When I’m there I can’t help feeling that the people who used to live in those caves are still there, in a way. They’re being very quiet, and looking at me.” She paused and stared at him with wide eyes. “It’s silly of me, isn’t it?”
Yes, she had him. He looked down at her and thought about Frijoles and the dead cave-dwellers, and he looked at her again and thought of the lost ages when men were men, and of the ladder he had climbed today, and of the letter he could write home about it. She knew it. She had him.