“Welcome to our fair city,” Pepper shouted. “Saw you get off the bus, so I prepared a proper reception. How about a guided tour while I run this trailer over to Red’s camp?”
“How long have you been here?” Sandy asked as they climbed aboard.
“Red flew me over last Friday in his Bonanza. I’ve got the hang of his entire layout already. Nothing to it, really.”
As he headed the jeep for the mountains, Pepper kept up a monologue in which skimpy descriptions of the countryside were mixed with large chunks of autobiography.
“Every square mile of this desert supports five Indians, fifty sheep, five hundred rattlesnakes and fifty thousand prairie dogs,” he joked as they left the pavement for a winding dirt trail. They bounced madly through clumps of sagebrush, prairie-dog colonies, and tortured hills made of many-colored rock.
“These roads wear out a car in a year, and you have to put in new springs every three months,” he added as they hit a chuckhole that made their teeth rattle.
“Look at those crazy rock formations,” he said later while the boys sweated and puffed to jack up the rear end of the trailer so it could get around a particularly sharp hairpin turn in the trail. (Now they knew why Pepper had extended his invitation for a tour!) “No telling what minerals you might find if you used electronic exploration methods on scrambled geology like this. Why, only last night, while we were sitting around the campfire at Elbow Rock, I said to Red: ‘Red,’ I said, just like that—we’ve become real pals already, you know—‘Red,’ I said, ‘why don’t we branch out? Why don’t we look for oil as well as uranium, now that we’re out here?’ And Red said to me: ‘Pepper,’ he said—”
“‘—when did you get your Ph.D. in geology?’” Sandy cut in.
“Nothing like that at all! ‘Pepper,’ he said, ‘you’re right on the electron beam. We’ll organize the Red Pepper Oil Exploration and Contracting Company and give John Hall and those other stick-in-the-muds a run for their money.’ Oops! Hope we didn’t break anything that time!”
The jeep’s front wheel had dropped into a pothole with a terrific thump.