The house was squat and ominous in the dark; the moon had long since set. Gin crept to bed by the light of the reading-lamp; she felt somehow that the bright light would outrage the hour. Her head felt very light. It wouldn’t next day. “Flo,” she called across the room, after she had settled down. There was something to talk over with Flo. What was it? Too much trouble.... “Oh, for heaven’s sake! What is it?” “I’m perfectly sober,” Gin said. There was no challenge and she continued, “But just the same, life’s peculiar.” CHAPTER FIVE Mary and the camp-chair sank down together for two inches. Then the chair squeaked and stopped giving in: it stayed where it was in space, poised above the throng of Santo Domingo Indians and dusty crabby tourists like a throne, disregarded on the pueblo roof. “Well,” she continued, when she was sure the chair had come to rest, “I do know that I’m at my wits’ ends. I’m desperate.” Casually, she drew a handkerchief out of her raffia bag and folded it over her nose, against the dust. Bob answered, “You wait until you’ve talked to Lucy Parker. Don’t give up hope at this stage. There’s such good material in the boy; you mustn’t give up hope.” He felt that he hadn’t said quite enough, but he was tired. Mary was exactly like a sack when she was in a crowd, he thought a little furtively: limp and useless. Dragging Mary and a camp-chair was very fatiguing. His eyes hurt in the sun but he fought against the impulse to put on the sun-glasses in his vest pocket. Mary looked so odd in hers. From the plaza beneath there came a confused roaring: a mixture of singing and soft-beating drums where the Indians were dancing to the music of the chorus, heavily overlaid and swamped by a loud conversation going on between people squatting before the house. Bob craned his neck to see over the heads of the Indians who blocked the view. He was trying to find Teddy. “It’s Blake’s fault,” said Mary, understanding him. “He’s always running off like that: this time he’s taken Teddy with him. It’s very rude of him. I must speak to him again.” She readjusted the handkerchief and settled the glasses on her nose. “This dust. I think he’s a schizoid personality, don’t you? I spoke to Brill about him. If I sell that Patterson property perhaps I might have him analyzed. But he seems so prejudiced against it, and I don’t want to force the child. What do you think?”