“Nuh-uh!” Sandy watched the faint flicker a thousand feet above them. “That must be where Cavanaugh has pitched his camp. He’s sending a message of some kind over light beam. If it were a heliograph transmitting in Morse code I could read it. But that’s a modulated beam.... Say, we’d better be moseying back to the motel. Must be about time for your truck to leave.”
“Sandy,” Quiz said half an hour later after they had shaken hands solemnly, “I’m going to do everything I can, when I get home, to do some detective work on Cavanaugh. If anything turns up, I’ll let you know quick.”
“Do that, Quiz.” Sandy swallowed and his voice broke. “Be seeing you.”
Quiz climbed slowly into the cab of the big tool truck. As it roared off into the starlit desert night he kept waving a forlorn farewell.
CHAPTER SIX
Cliff Dweller Country
Sandy had expected that the opening of bids for leases on thousands of acres in the Navajo reservation would be an exciting occasion, something like a country auction. Instead, he found it a great bore.
Scores of bidders in their shirt sleeves lounged on hard straight-backed chairs in the stuffy meeting room of the Indian Service building, or chatted, smoked and told jokes in the corridors. Kenneth White and other representatives of the Indian Service sat behind a long redwood table, opened piles of envelopes, compared bids, held long whispered conferences with grave, leather-faced members of the Navajo Council and their advisers, and very occasionally handed down decisions.
“The bid of $3,900 per acre made for 200 Navajo acres in San Juan County, northeast, southeast of Section 27-24 N-8 is accepted,” White then would drone. Or: “A bid of $318 per acre for 125 acres of Section 18, 42 north, 30 east is rejected by the Council because it’s too low. Another bid may be made at the August meeting, if desired.”
After an hour of this, Sandy was counting the cracks in the floor, watching flies buzzing against the windowpanes, and wondering whether he dared ask Mr. Hall to be excused. He hesitated about doing this because the oilman was following the bidding with tense interest and making endless notes on the backs of old envelopes that he kept dragging out of his vest pockets.
“Ssst!” Ralph whispered from the seat behind him. “This is murder. How about having a second breakfast with me?