It was the red headed man who grinned and made a totally incomprehensible demand.
“Hello, old scout! Trot out the feed bag. Bring on the pâté de foies gras and the duck canapé. You’ve got cash customers!”
The words were a jumble of harsh sounds to Juan, whose throat was attuned to the nearly impossible gutturals of Araucanian speech. Juan’s Spanish, even, was limited to the irreducible vocabulary needed for avoiding kicks.
He blinked stolidly as the red headed man went off into a fit of unreasonable laughter. He was afraid, of course. These men were white men, and they were mad, and Juan was internally in a panic. But he blinked at them without expression.
The Yanqui with gray eyes addressed him in Spanish. It was halting, stumbling Spanish, nearly as insufficient as Juan’s own. But Juan understood a word here and there. “Pez ... carne ... frijoles.” These were reasonable demands. He had none of them, but he could understand them, anyhow.
The man with the boots spoke in the unintelligible language these men used among themselves. He was subtly native to these wilds, as the others were subtly alien, and Juan feared him by instinct.
“He won’t have anything you asked for, Walker.” Juan heard the meaningless syllables in an anguished unease. “We’ll just have to do with what he’s got.”
Juan debated anxiously whether the sounds he had just heard referred to him, whether they indicated an intention to kill him. These were madmen...
The Yanqui with gray eyes chuckled suddenly.
“How’ll we pay him? We’ve no money, no shells, nor any tobacco. How’ll we pay him?”