Jim watched him in silent admiration of his deftness with the weaving and in disgust at his use of the coffee pot—thinking he would want no more draughts from it himself. All the time his mind grew clearer and he began to form plans for telling Dorothy where he was—though he didn’t know that, himself; but, at least, of letting her know he was alive. She would have to guess at the rest and she would surely trust him to come back when he could.
When the weaver looked up again Jim beckoned him to approach. Rather reluctantly, he did so. For his own part he was getting tired of this helpless lad, left in his hut by White Feather, his Ute brother-in-law. If Moon Face were living, the Ute maiden who had been his wife and little José’s mother, it wouldn’t have mattered. To her would have fallen the care. Nothing had gone right with him, Alaric, the sheep herder, since Moon Face fell ill and died, though he went often to that far place in the forest where her body had been secretly buried in the crevice of a great rock. Moon Face had left him for a few days’ visit to a camp of her relatives and there had taken the small-pox and died, despite the fact that she had been treated by the wisest medicine men and immersed in the sweat-box, the Indian cure for all ills. If he had been near enough to such a thing, or had had energy enough to prepare it up here at his home, Alaric would promptly have subjected poor Jim to similar treatment.
As it was, the isolation of Alaric’s hut and his laziness saved the wanderer from this. Now, as he obeyed the boy’s summons, he was brooding over his misfortunes and was more grim even than usual.
“Well, young man?”
Jim was surprised. The man had been so silent, hitherto, that he imagined they two had no language in common.
“So you speak English! That makes it easy. I want to send a message to the place I—I left. Will you take it?”
Alaric shook his head, firmly declining.
“Don’t get ugly. If you won’t go, will you send somebody?”
The Mexican pretended that his English did not go so far as this. He obstinately would not understand.