Norton, Andre - Novel 32 (4 page)

The
Wildhorses
were no longer
smiling. In
stead
they had drawn together by their home
on wheels. Lucas glanced from Christie to the station.

"Maybe we'd better pull on, Pinto. Didn't
hear about the change—"

Just then the door opened and Father came
out. Pinto again introduced the
newcomers.
Father
held out his hand.

"Glad to see new neighbors. Simpson told
me that you planned
to spend the summer near
here."

"We did," Lucas answered. "But if the sta
tion is starting up we can make
other plans—"

"Nonsense!"
Father said quickly. "You
have a better right to be here
than the rest of
us,
if the truth be told. Patricia," he called,
"come and
meet
our
neighbors."

So they had breakfast together, Mother and
Mrs.
Wildhorse
working to prepare it. Christie
eyed Libby and
Toliver
shyly.
She did not get up courage to speak until the Navajo girl knelt
to admire Shan. The twins and
Neal had already
drawn closer to see
Toliver's
knife in its beaded
sheath, eagerly listening to him tell about the horse that had just been
transferred from their
trailer to the
corral.

"I never saw a cat like this before," Libby
said.

"His name's Thai Shan. He's Siamese and
Burmese both," Christie
answered in a rush of
words.
"That's a lot different from most cats.
Look! He really likes you."

Shan had stopped washing a paw to sniff at
the hand Libby held out to him.
Then he rubbed
his
head back and forth against her fingers.

"Scratch him behind the ears and under his
throat. That's what he likes
best," Christie sug
gested.

"I had a cat once," Libby volunteered. "But
when we traveled
around so much she got lost.
I missed
her a lot."

"Do you live in the truck van all the time?"
Christie wanted to know.

"Mostly, except in the middle of the winter.
My father is a geologist, only
right now he's
working
for the Navajo Tribal Council, keeping
in touch with all the herders out on the range
in between his prospecting. He
does a lot of
things—writes
pieces for magazines, goes rock
hunting, now he's writing a history of our peo
ple. He doesn't like to live
inside a town.
Mother
paints pictures. They have shows of
them sometimes. She even had a show all by
herself last winter and a lot of
people came and
bought
them. That was exciting. They inter
viewed her on TV, too."

"You don't—" Christie hesitated, and then
spoke frankly. "You aren't
like what I thought
Indians
are." Then she flushed. What a dumb,
rude thing to say! She was sorry. But Libby
was smiling instead of looking
mad.

"We're Navajos, all right, but my mother
and father went to college back
east. My father
was
an officer in the army, too. But this is our
real home country and we like it best here. We
are truly of the
Dineh
—the People—even if we
don't always stay on the reservation. Mother
and I, we have Navajo dresses. We
wear them
when we
visit with our people, but not when we travel. Those wide skirts are not good
for
climbing
in and out of the van. Are you going
to
live here now?"

"I don't know," Christie admitted.

Libby looked sober now. "Yes—maybe Mr.
Toner won't let you."

"Who is Mr. Toner?" Christie demanded in
surprise. She had not heard that
name before
in all
the talk between Father and Mother.

"He has a ranch, over there—" Libby
pointed eastward with her chin as
she still patted Shan. "He's
been wanting
to get
this valley
for a
long time—because of the water. He's
always riding over and trying to get Pinto to move out.
But Pinto has some kind of a paper
that says he has a right to stay here for some
years. It belongs to the stage
company still, so
Mr.
Toner has had to wait. Only he said a cou
ple of months ago that this year Pinto's paper
wasn't any good anymore and now
he'd get the
land.
He wants it very badly."

"Well, he can't get it," returned Christie
firmly. "My father has it now."

"He won't give up easily." Libby did not
look so sure. "You'll see.
He'll come over
again—probably
with Marlene."

"Who's Marlene?"

"His daughter."
Libby's answer was very
short and something in her tone
made Christie
feel
that the Navajo girl did not like Marlene
in the least.

Neal and
Toliver
, with the twins
trailing
them,
joined the girls.

"Listen here, Chris, it's about the Plan."
Neal was plainly excited. "
Toliver
, he thinks
he knows where we can get some good arrow
heads. Maybe it was one of those places where
they had a fight in the old days."

The Navajo boy nodded. "Come on over to
the bus," he said. "I
can show you some we picked up last year. Remember, Libby, down
that side wash?"

Shan had stuck his claws into Libby's shirt
for anchorage and was standing on
his hind feet.
She
put her arm around the cat. "Can we take
him with us?" she asked Christie.

"If we keep him on the
leash.
He
might stray
off and
get lost."

"You mean he'll walk on a leash—like a
dog?"
Toliver
asked. "I never knew a cat
would do that."

"Siamese cats will. We taught Shan to when
he was just a kitten. We didn't
want to lose him
and
back home we lived on a street where there were a lot of cars passing all the
time—he could
have
run out and been killed."

She clipped on the leash and they all went
to the truck-van.
Toliver
climbed inside and
returned with a box in his hand. He led the way
to the shadow of a tree and they all dropped
down to watch him take out his discoveries.

"This is a spearhead, and these are arrow-
heads—you can see that by the
size. Look here,
see this real small
one—it's really made of hard
bone and was
probably for hunting birds. And
this
is a knife, only the point is broken."

"You want to collect arrowheads?" Libby
asked Christie.

"Well—" For a moment Christie hesitated.
The Plan was sort of a private
thing. But ap
parently Neal had already
told
Toliver
, so it did
not matter if she explained to Libby.

"You see, it's really part of a plan Neal and
I have. Getting the station started
and making
people
want to stop here when the new road
is open—that is important. We started watching
the different motels as we came. Some had ad
vertised swimming pools and TVs and all the
usual things. But here we can't have a swimming
pool and I don't know about TVs either.
But other motels had special things made up to
make you want to stop and see them—"

"Yes,"
Parky
interrupted. "One had a lot of
birds—big fancy ones in an outside cage. And
there was another with a buffalo—honest, a real
live buffalo! He was eating grass in a field and
you could watch him."

"Those places," Christie went on, "put out
signs for miles
ahead about what you could see.
We stopped at two places just because of the
signs. So if we could have
something special
to
show here, something we could put up a sign
to tell about, then more people might want
to
stop. That's our plan—to find the
right things
to show."

"Last night"—Neal looked up from the bro
ken knife he was
holding—"Pinto showed us two arrowheads stuck in one of the window
shutters. He said they were shot
in there during
an
Apache raid. Well, everyone likes stories
about the Old West. If we could show a lot of Indian
things—"

"Old Indian things," Christie interrupted
him quickly. "Not Indians
today. We don't
mean—"
She again felt as if she might be saying
the wrong thing.

Toliver
laughed. "You afraid we'd
think you
believe we still go around
raiding? That was all
a long time ago. My
dad always says we have to forget a lot of bad things, both you people and us.
But maybe you have got a good idea, talking about the history of the Apache
raids here and all. Anyway, we can take you to the place where we found these,
and maybe there are more. You could think about getting other
things too—like those they kept in the station
in the old days. What you really ought to have
is
a real stagecoach to set up by the corral. That
would be worth seeing!"

"
Gollee
!"
Parky
cried.
"A real stagecoach!
That sure would be keen. Could we,
Neal,
could we?"

His brother shook his head. "No such luck
as that. We had
better plan on what we can
find—
Is
this arrow place far from here? How
do we get to it?"

Just then Christie remembered Pinto's warn
ing, the one he had given her
only that morning.
"Pinto
said we have to keep in sight of the
station. He told me it was easy to get lost out
there and there were snakes
and—"

She saw Neal frown, but
Toliver
spoke first.

"It isn't far. We've been there lots of times.
So you couldn't get lost if you
went with us.
Maybe we can do it
soon—" He seemed nearly
as eager as
Neal looked.

"Why not go now?" demanded
Parky
.
Perks
crowded up
beside him as if she was ready to
take off as soon as her twin made a move.
Parky
did most of the talking, but Perks was all ready
to back him up in any action.

"No. You know we've got to help here—
unpacking," Christie reminded them, though she, too, would have liked to
follow
Parky's
suggestion. "The truck with all our furniture
is coming out from town today. And
mother
has to go in
to shop. She has a big, long list of
things—she keeps adding to it all the time. We
can't go today."

Parky
looked entirely unconvinced. But
he
knew better than
to start off without Neal or
Christie. He
had done that once during this trip,
only to
lose
himself
and Perks. What Father
had said to
him when they had been found after two hours of anxious search had impressed
one
fact on him—he was never to go off again
with
out one of the older children
along.

"Someone is coming down the road."
Toli
ver
had turned his head to listen.
Baron raced
away
from where he had been standing by Neal
to loose a flurry of loud barks. They could see the dust
rising from the rutted road now as an
other truck pulled along toward them through the entrance
of the canyon. Christie ran to the
house to announce its arrival and the whole of
the station erupted into action as
if it were the
old
days and a stage were pulling in with cargo
and passengers needing instant attention.

Lucas
Wildhorse
drove their
truck-van on
past the
corral to park it in a stretch of field
beyond, clearing a space so the men could un
load. Boxes and cartons were
pulled out, car
ried
in, or left stacked on the dirt-floored porch.