“Are all Navajos named Hosteen something-or-other?”
“Hosteen means ‘Mister.’ Most white men don’t use the term. The Navajos resent that, too.”
“I guess I’ve got a lot to learn,” the boy sighed.
“You’re doing all right.” Ralph slapped him on the knee.
They made camp in a forest of pines not far from a dry wash that ran into the San Juan River gorge, and started work at once. Donovan split the party into two groups. One, which he headed, loaded the heavy magnetometer and gravimeter equipment into a truck and set out to check formations revealed by the aerial studies. Ralph and Sam Stack, a burly surveyor who had arrived with the portable drill rig, took charge of a transit, plane table and Brunton compass. They named Sandy and three others to carry stadia rods and help them make a careful surface survey of the vicinity where the oil anticline was believed to be.
Then began one of the hardest weeks of grinding labor that Sandy had ever put in. All day long he climbed over rocks and fought briary thickets while moving his rod to spots where it could be seen from the various transit positions. His experience on Boy Scout geology field trips kept him from getting lost and enabled him to chip a number of rock formations for analysis. But it was only after he returned to camp at night and propped his tired eyes open with his fingers while watching Don, Ralph and Stack plot lines on a topographical map of the region, that he could form any idea of what was being done.
Hall joined them on the third evening and watched without comment as the work went on. He looked gray and tired.
“You seem bushed, John,” said Donovan after they had added the day’s data to the map. “Any trouble?”
“Plenty, Don. At the last minute the bank refused a loan. It said that two wells didn’t make a profitable field, out here in the middle of nowhere. I had to trade a two-thirds interest in the other lease to Midray before I got my money!”
“That’s the way the oil squirts,” Ralph said philosophically. “So we’re in partnership with a big company.”