They found that the axle had wedged itself against a rock. Thirty minutes later, while they were still trying to get it loose, a rattletrap car pulled up beside them and an Indian stuck his flat, mahogany-colored face through its window.
“Give us a hand—please,” Pepper ordered.
The newcomer started to get out. Then his black eyes settled on the lettering on the side of the trailer:
Cavanaugh Laboratories
Farmington, N.M. & Valley View, Cal.
“Cavanaugh! Huh!” snorted the Indian. He slammed the door of his car and roared off in a cloud of yellow dust.
“Those confounded Indians,” snarled Pepper, staring after him in white-faced fury. “I’d like to.... Oh, well. Come on, fellows. Guess we’ve got to do this ourselves.”
They finally got the jeep back on the trail and drove the twenty miles to Elbow Rock without further mishap. There Pepper parked beside a sparkling trout stream. They raided the trailer’s big freezer for sandwich materials and ate lunch at a spot overlooking a thousand square miles of yellow desert backed by blue, snowcapped peaks. Pepper was at his best as a host. For once in their lives, Sandy and Quiz almost liked him. At least here he seemed much pleasanter than he did at home, lording it over everyone—or trying to.
In the cool of the afternoon—85 degrees in the sun instead of the 110 degrees the thermometer had shown at noon—they rode the jeep back to Farmington by way of a wide detour that took them within sight of the San Juan River gorge.
“I wanted to show you those two oil-well derricks over yonder,” Pepper explained. “They’re a mile and a half apart, as the crow flies. But, because they’re on opposite sides of the river, they were 125 long miles apart by car until we got that new bridge finished a few months ago. Shows you the problems we explorers face.”
“The San Juan runs into the Colorado, doesn’t it?” Quiz asked as he studied the tiny stream at the bottom of its deep gorge, under the fine new steel bridge.