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you’d be so kind as to shut up, I’d appreciate it.”
    That was something for her to say. The only trouble was, it egged Braden on. “A nice girl talking like that,” he said, watching her. “Maybe you lived with them too long. Maybe that’s it. You live with them a while and you forget how a white person talks.”
    I couldn’t see Russell’s face or his reaction to all this. But a minute later I could see what was going to happen, and I began thinking every which way of how to change the subject.
    “A white woman,” Mrs. Favor said, “couldn’t live the way they do. The Apache woman rubbing skins and grinding corn, their hair greasy and full of vermin. The men no better. All of them standing around or squatting, picking at themselves and the dogs sniffing them. They even eat the dogs sometimes.”
    She was watching the McLaren girl again, leading up to something, but I wasn’t sure what. “I wonder,” she said, “if a woman could fall into their ways and after a while it wouldn’t bother her.Like eating with your fingers. Or do you suppose you could eat a dog and not think anything of it?”
    Here’s where you could see it coming.
    John Russell said, “What if you didn’t have anything else to eat?” This was the first time he’d spoken since we left Sweetmary. His voice was calm, but still there was an edge to it.
    Mrs. Favor looked from the McLaren girl to Russell.
    “I don’t care how hungry I got. I know I wouldn’t eat one of those camp dogs.”
    “I think,” John Russell said, “you have to know the hunger they feel before you can be sure.”
    “The government supplies them with meat,” Mrs. Favor said. “Every week or so I’d see them come in for their beef ration. And they’re allowed to hunt. They can hunt whenever their rations are low.”
    “But they are always low,” Russell said. “Or used up, and there’s not game enough to take care of everybody.”
    “You hear all kinds of stories of how the Indian is oppressed by the white man,” Dr. Favor said. I was surprised that he had been listening and seemed interested now.
    He said, “I suppose you will always hear those stories as long as there is sympathy for the Indian’s plight, and that’s a good thing. But you have to liveon a reservation for a time, like San Carlos, to see that caring for Indians is not a simple matter of giving them food and clothing.”
    He was watching John Russell all the while and seemed to be picking his words carefully. “You see all the problems then that the Interior Department is faced with,” he said. “The natural resentment on the part of the Indians, their distrust, their reluctance to cultivate the soil.”
    “Having to live where they don’t want to live,” John Russell said.
    “That too,” Dr. Favor agreed. “Which can’t be helped for the time being.” His eyes were still on Russell. “Do you happen to know someone at San Carlos?”
    “Many of them,” Russell said.
    “You’ve visited the agency?”
    “I lived there. For three years.”
    “I didn’t think I recognized you,” Dr. Favor said. “Did you work for one of the suppliers?”
    “On the police,” Russell said.
    Dr. Favor didn’t say anything. I couldn’t see his expression in the dimness, only that he was still looking at Russell.
    Then his wife said, “But the police are all Apaches.”
    She stopped there, and all you heard was the rattling and creaking and wind rushing past and the muffled pounding of the horses.
    I thought, Now he’ll explain it. Whether he thinks they’ll believe him or not, at least he’ll say something.
    But John Russell didn’t say a word. Not one single word. Maybe he’s thinking how to explain it, I thought. There was no way of knowing that. But he must have been thinking something and I would have given anything to know what it was. How he could just sit there in that silence was the hardest thing I have ever tried to figure out.
    Finally Mrs. Favor said, “Well, I