“I think you’re being prejudiced.” Sandy smoothed his cowlick desperately. Would she throw him out of the trailer for being so bold?
“So that’s why you came!” She startled him by bursting into a merry peal of laughter. “That was brave, after the—after the nasty way I treated you at Farmington. Very well, teacher. Tell me why you think Great-uncle Kit was a friend of the Navajos.”
Sandy began haltingly, but soon warmed to his subject while the Navajo children came in from their play, gathered around him, and listened intently. Remembering old stories his mother had told him, Sandy related how Kit, an undersized, sickly boy of fifteen, had learned to make saddles so he could get a job with a wagon train that was heading west from his home town in Missouri.
He went on to tell how his great-uncle had overcome endless hardships to become famous as a hunter, trapper and scout with Frémont’s expedition. He described how Kit had driven a flock of 6,500 sheep across the Rockies to prevent a famine that threatened the early settlers in California. He explained the happy ending to the blockade of the Navajos in the Canyon de Chelly, and wound up by telling how Carson had left his deathbed to go to Washington and make one more plea for government help for “his Indians.”
“That’s about all,” he concluded, “except that a town and a river in Nevada, and an oil field in New Mexico are named after Kit Carson. He must have been a good man.”
“Perhaps he was,” the girl said softly while her pupils smiled and nodded their dark heads. “I’ll be kinder to him when I teach a history lesson after this. He sounds a lot nicer than some of the people I have met recently. That Mr. Cavanaugh, for instance....” She turned up her snub nose and let her voice trail off.
“Cavanaugh!” Sandy cried. “Has he been prowling around here too?”
“Yes. He drove through here this morning in a truck. Said he was making some sort of ax minerals survey of school lands. Also said he’d stop by again after school. Will you stay here until he has gone, Mr. Cars—Mr. Steele? I can’t bear him.”
“I will if you’ll call me Sandy,” the boy said bashfully.
“All right, Sandy. And you may call me Kitty.”