LITMIR.BIZ

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into his mouth, shivering delightedly as the water that dripped from his rope-colored, half-long hair trickled inside the open collar of his faded blue shirt and ran down his spine. Thus, for several minutes he enjoyed himself—eating, shivering, staring at the damp, burlap-wrapped water jar, wondering about what sort of miracle it wrought in making the water within it so much colder than the air without. Someone had told him “evaporation,” but he was still asking himself “Why?”

      He glanced over at the big spirit thermometer hanging in the deepest shade against the canvas lower wall of the summer kitchen and shook his head when he saw that the column of red liquid stood at no. At noon, a temperature of a hundred and ten would have been nothing to remark about, but at seven in the morning—South Boy said “Uh-huh, hot!” He began listening for small noises that should be heard at that time in the morning, but there were none. The world about was already wrapped in the dead, heavy silence brought about by the desert’s midday heat.

      From inside the kitchen a querulous voice called, “Chico?”

      “Hi!” croaked South Boy.

      “Vente! Vente!” the voice cracked angrily.

      “Vengo, ya,” grumbled South Boy; and then he said to himself in English, “I bet a short-bit we’re in for a spell of crazy weather!” and tossed away the grape stem.

      It was stifling in the screen-and-canvas summer kitchen. South Boy let the screen door slam just to relieve the untimely stillness and sat down at the near end of a long plank table. A huge Mexican woman in a gray wrapper, the sweat streaming down her fat face, flounced angrily over to the stove, dumped tepid, soggy flapjacks and limp bacon from a frying pan onto a chipped enamel plate, and slid it down the length of the table before she slopped a crockery cup full of coffee from a gallon pot.

      South Boy reached for the syrup. The cook slumped down into her old rocker by the stove and glared at him. He knew why she was angry. She was a creature of habit and never left the kitchen until all the men had been fed; so, waiting for him, she’d sat there and stewed when she might have been under the shade of her favorite willow by the main irrigating ditch since sunup if he’d have come to breakfast at the regular time. He knew if she’d been a white woman or a Mojave she’d have hunted him up long ago and given him a jawing for keeping her waiting. But this woman came from some obscure, subjected race down on the Mexican plateau—a people that had been serfs of the Spaniards for four hundred years and serfs of unknown red masters for generations before that. So she didn’t speak out, but glowered and sulked and chewed on her grievance after the manner of the downtrodden, and brooded over some devious retaliation in the depth of her mind like a hen owl brooding over her eggs.

      It came to South Boy then that he should say something to excuse himself for the inconvenience he had caused her. He would have said it, too, if she had been able to understand English or Mojave; but the heat made his mind too lazy to think up the appropriate Mexican phrases. Instead it slipped easily into making and rejecting plans for his day as he sopped up syrup with sections of flapjack.

      He thought of twisting a new hair rope, or cleaning his saddle, or going fishing, or hunting up his old friend the trapper, called the Mormonhater; but he rejected each of these ideas as it came up: Too much work . . . Too much traveling . . . The Mormonhater might be hard to find. His boat hadn’t been seen in the near stretches of the river for a couple of months . . .

      Just as he wiped up the last of the syrup with the last leathery sop, the cook broke out with a mirthless, cackling giggle. He looked up to see a fat forefinger pointed at his head.

      “Bonitos—cabellos—lar-r-rgos,” she droned with a slow exaggeration of dega dialect of the peon that denoted heavy sarcasm. South Boy batted his eyes and chewed methodically, trying to figure out what she was up to.

      “Un otro Boofalo Beel, como El Bravo!” she continued, staring at South Boy with sullen expectancy. South Boy stared back at her complacently, mumbling over her words. “Pretty long hair. Another Buffalo Bill, like El Bravo,” she said in a tone that was deliberately insulting.

      He knew El Bravo, the Tough Guy, was her name for her husband, a moody and combative exile from Texas who bossed the ranch when South Boy’s father wasn’t around to do his own bossing. He knew that El Bravo wore his hair down to his shoulders and that on the wall of his bedroom, where he could see it every morning when he awoke, he had tacked a signed photograph of Colonel Cody. Not that he admired the Colonel so much; in fact he said publicly that he could out-shoot, outride, and even outdrink Bill Cody any time. South Boy had heard him make the statement. The Foreman had kept the picture as a symbol of what might have been. For El Bravo was once well on the way to becoming a celebrated Western Character himself.

      He’d been a trail driver, a ranger, a valiant fighter against the Apache and the Comanche, and a rare shot with a rifle and pistol. About the time when Colonel Cody was making headlines with the European tour of his Wild West Show, certain men of money decided to put El Bravo on the road with a show of his own. But it so happened that on the eve of the launching of the enterprise, El Bravo had to kill one of the backers of his show, a person of wide family connections and considerable political influence.

      So El Bravo rode for Arizona with vengeance on his heels, and instead of becoming the darling of the crowds in the East and in Europe entertained by duchesses and such, he went on a prolonged drunk in Prescott and woke up legally married to this Mexican woman. Now he was working on a little two-by-four ranch—his own description—married to a hay bag he was shamed to take to Needles, even.

      All this South Boy knew very well, because the Foreman had often told him. He didn’t know that the Hay Bag had long since discovered that she could avenge herself upon her husband by simply pointing her finger at him and drawling, “Como Boofalo Beel, no?” Sometimes he would brood for days afterwards. South Boy didn’t understand that she expected the same reaction from any other long-haired male. So he just blinked at her, puzzled.

      “Como Boofalo Beel, no?” she cried, her voice rising.

      Then she did what the daughters of the downtrodden never do except in last desperation. She resorted to violence. She seized the pot off the stove and threw it at South Boy.

      South Boy, who was through eating, ducked the pot handily and dived out through the door. He paused for a moment under the grape arbor and listened to the turmoil of dish-smashing going on within. He glanced at the red column of the thermometer—114, and rising.

      “Yep, crazy weather,” he said. “And it’s sure got ol’ Hay Bag.”

      He’d discarded all ideas of doing anything interesting that day and decided he would try reading. So he walked over to the ranch house, got down on his belly, and crawled under the back gallery where the space between the floor and the ground was too limited to admit anyone but himself and the house cat. Back about six or eight feet was a small depression where the cat had her semiannual litter of kittens and South Boy kept his personal cache. Thence he took an old copy of Bob Ingersoll’s lectures that had remained unread since the Mormonhater had loaned it to him in the spring, and slowly backing out into the sunlight and shading his eyes with the book, he returned to his sleeping place under the palm tree.

      There he sat with his back against the rough bole of the tree, idly turning the pages. The book didn’t look very interesting. He had only consented to take it home in the first place because of the divergent opinions the Mormonhater and his mother had expressed about Mr. Ingersoll. His mother said he was the Devil’s disciple. The Mormonhater said he was the smartest man ever born.

      South Boy had been aiming to find out why for a long time, but until now his days had been too full. Now he tried hard to find out whatever there was great or devilish in the first few lines, but the sweat ran into his eyes and blinded him. The bees, in their desperate attempt to air-condition their breeding chambers, were making too much noise. And without warning South Boy began to be bothered about his hair. It had grown long, or “half-long,” as the Mojaves say, simply because since his mother was gone no one had taken the trouble to say, “Cut the boy’s hair.” As for his part, it was easier to let it grow than to get it cut. He never thought about it until the Mexican woman

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