Listening Woman

Warriors slipped away to the King Ranch in Texas to buy one, but they came back empty-handed. And after that, the old people taught, Boy Medicine had left the Kiowas and the last of the medicine bundles had disappeared.

Leaphorn thought about it. Could Kelongy actually have come into possession of one of the sacred medicine bundles? He had preached a revival of the Buffalo religion. He promised the return of utopia, the white men exterminated, and Native Americans again living in a free society. The Buffalo then would again spring from the earth in their millions and nurture the children of the sun.

Leaphorn became aware of heat against his finger his cigarette burning too close to the skin. He took a final drag, stubbed it out, and studied the smoke trickling slowly upward from his lips. He felt a vague uneasiness. Some thought struggling to be remembered.

Something nameless tugging at him. He tried to let it surface and found himself thinking vaguely of witchcraft, remembering incongruously something that had no connection at all with what he had been reading, remembering Listening Woman telling him that more than one of the holy sand paintings had been desecrated in the place where Hosteen Tso had been. And remembering that it had occurred to Listening Woman, as it had occurred to him, that Hosteen Tso might have been involved in some sort of perverted ritual of a coven of Navajo Wolves.

The door to the interrogation room opened. A youngish man in a seersucker suit came in, glanced curiously at Leaphorn, said Excuse me, and left. Leaphorn stretched and yawned, put the Tull folder back into the accordion file that held it, and resumed his fishing expedition through the remaining material.

The helicopter pilot seemed straight. He had flown copters in Vietnam. He had a wife and two children. There was no criminal record. The only question the FBI had been able to raise about his character referred to three trips to Las Vegas over the past two years, after two of which he told informants he had won small amounts of money.

Kelongy had a much thicker file, but it added nothing substantial to Leaphorns knowledge. Kelongy was a violent man, and a bitter one, and a dreamer of deadly dreams. Three of the other minimum of six participants in the Santa Fe robbery remained nameless and faceless. There was a short file for a Jackie Noni, a young part-Potawatomi with a brief but violent police record, who apparently drove the car that blocked the armored truck.

That left Tull’s buddy, the one the FBI called Hoski. There was nothing standard about Hoski.

The FBI had no real idea who he was. It listed him as Frank Hoski, also known as Colton Hoski, a.k.a. Frank Morris, a.k.a. Van Black. The only photograph in the file as a grainy blowup obviously taken with a telephoto lens in bad light. It showed a trim but slightly stocky man, face partially averted, coming through a doorway. The mans hair was black, or very dark, and he looked Indian, possibly Navajo or Apache, Leaphorn thought, or possibly something else. He reminded Leaphorn vaguely of the uneasiness that had been troubling him, but he could dredge up absolutely nothing. The legend under the photo guessed Hoskis weight at about 190, and his height at about five foot eleven, his race as probably Indian, or part Indian, and his identifying marks as possible heavy scar tissue under hairline above right cheek.

Not much was known of Hoskis career. He had first appeared at Wounded Knee, where informers listed him as one of the violents and as a right-hand man of Kelongy. A man who fit his description and used the name Frank Morris was seen by witnesses at the Ogden robbery and FBI informers confirmed that Hoski and Morris were identical. What was known about him was mostly pieced together from FBI informers who had infiltrated AIM. He was believed to be a Vietnam war veteran. Three informers identified him as army, two of the three as a demolitions expert, the other as an infantry company radioman. He occasionally smoked cigars, was a moderate drinker, was pugnacious (having engaged in fistfights on three occasions with other AIM members), often told jokes, had once lived in Los Angeles, had once lived in Memphis, and possibly once lived in Provo, Utah. Had no known homosexual tendencies, had no known relationships with females, had only one known close friend, a subject identified as John Tull. He had been identified again, on a most likely basis, as the man wearing the police uniform who had diverted the Wells Fargo truck into the robbery trap at Santa Fe. He came into view again in Washington, D.C., where he was working as a janitor for a company identified as Safety Systems, Inc., which dealt in burglary alarms, locking systems and other security devices.

Leaphorn opened the last section of the report. The FBI, he was thinking, was in an enviable situation relative to Hoski. They had spotted him without Hoskis knowing he was spotted. A string tied to a key man in the Buffalo Society would almost inevitably lead eventually to other members of the terrorist group. The agency would put its best people on the surveillance team. It wouldn’t risk either tipping Hoski or allowing him to slip away.

Leaphorn read. The head of the team of the FBI's best people, assigned to keep Hoski on the FBI string, was George Witover. And that, of course, was why Witover had been sent back to the Albuquerque agency, and why Witover was willing to break a rule. Hoski had cut the string under Witover’s eyes.

Leaphorn read on. Until the very end, Witover’s operation had seemed to go flawlessly.

Hoski had been located more than a month after the Santa Fe robbery. He followed a routine. Each weekday afternoon about 6 P.M., Hoski would emerge from his utility apartment, walk two blocks to a bus stop and catch a bus to his job at Safety Systems, Inc., where he was employed under the name Theodore Parker. On the premises, he would eat a midnight lunch, carried from his apartment in a sack, with a black fellow janitor. At about 4:30 A.M. he would leave the Safety Systems, Inc. building, walk five blocks to a bus stop and catch the bus back to his apartment. He would reemerge from the apartment in the early afternoon, to do grocery shopping, take care of his laundry at a neighborhood coin-operated laundromat, take long walks, or sit in a park overlooking the Potomac. The routine had rarely varied and never in any important degree until March 23.

On that date he was observed at the laundromat engaging in a lengthy conversation with a young woman, subsequently identified as Rosemary Rita Oliveras, twenty-eight, divorced, an immigrant from Puerto Rico. On March 30, the two had again met at the laundromat, engaged in conversation, and later gone for a wandering walk which lasted more than three hours. On April 1, a Saturday, Hoski had surprised his surveillance by emerging from his apartment before noon and walking to the boardinghouse where Mrs.

Oliveras resided. The two thereupon walked to a cafe, lunched and went to a movie.

Subsequently Hoski spent most of his free time with Mrs. Oliveras. Otherwise, nothing changed.

The mail cover on Hoski continued turning up one outgoing letter every week, either left for the mailman or dropped in a letter slot. The letter was invariably addressed to an Eloy R. Albertson, General Delivery, West Covina, California, and invariably contained the same message: Dear Eloy: Nothing new. Hoski.

No one had ever appeared at the West Covina post office to claim the letters.

The second variation in the pattern of Hoskis behavior came on March 11. A taxicab had pulled up to his address at about 1 P.M. and had taken Hoski to an urban renewal demolition district two blocks from the Potomac. He left the cab at a street corner, walked through a mixture of wind-driven rain and sleet to a telephone booth and made a brief call.

He then walked down the street into the sheltered doorway of an abandoned storefront across the street from the Office Bar. Approximately twenty minutes later, at 2:11 P.M., a taxi discharged a passenger at the entrance of the Office Bar. The passenger was subsequently identified as Robert Rainey, thirty-two, a former activist in the Students for a Democratic Society, and a former AIM member, with a three-rap demonstration-related arrest record. He immediately entered the bar. The FBI agent watching Hoski notified his control that a meeting seemed impending. A second agent was dispatched. The second agent arrived twenty-one minutes after Rainey entered the bar. Informed that Hoski was still waiting across the street from the Office Bar, the second agent parked his van down the street. To avoid suspicion, he left the vehicle and took up a position out of sight in the doorway of an empty storefront. About three minutes after he did so, Hoski walked down the street to the doorway, spoke to the agent about getting in out of the weather, and then walked back up the street and into the Office Bar. The second agent thereupon checked and discovered that the alley exit from this bar was closed off by a locked garbage-access gate. Since the second agent had been seen, the first agent entered the bar to determine whether Hoski was making a contact. Hoski was sitting in a booth with Rainey. The agent ordered a beer, drank it at the bar and left there being no opportunity to overhear the conversation between Hoski and Rainey. Hoski left the bar about ten minutes later, walked to the telephone booth at the end of the block, made a brief telephone call, and then returned to his apartment by bus. He emerged again, as was usual, to take a bus to his job.

It is presumed that Rainey delivered a message, the report said.

Leaphorn rubbed his eyes. A messenger, of course, but how had the meeting been arranged? Not by mail, which was covered. Not by telephone, which was tapped. A note hand-delivered to Hoskis mail slot, perhaps. Or handed to him on a bus. Or a prearranged visit to a pay-phone information drop. There were any of a thousand ways to do it. That meant Hoski either knew he was being watched, or suspected he was, or was naturally cautious. Leaphorn frowned. That made Hoskis behavior relative to the meeting inconsistent. The bar was outside Hoskis regular territory, broke his routine, was sure to attract FBI attention. And so, certainly, was his behavior the long wait outside the bar, all that. Leaphorn frowned. The frown gradually converted itself to a smile, to a broad, delighted grin, as Leaphorn realized what Hoski had been doing. Still grinning, Leaphorn leaned back in the chair and stared at the wall, reconstructing it all.

Hoski had known he was being followed and had gone to considerable pains to keep the FBI from knowing that he knew. The weekly letters to California, for example. No one would ever pick them up. Their only purpose was to assure the FBI that Hoski suspected nothing. And then the message had come. Probably a note to call a telephone number.

From a pay phone. Hoski had picked an isolated bar and a meeting time which would guarantee low traffic and high visibility. He had picked a bar without a back entrance to assure that no one could enter without being seen by Hoski. He had notified the messenger of the meeting place only after he was in position to watch the front door. Then he had waited to watch the messenger arrive-and to watch the FBI reaction to the arrival and Hoskis other unorthodox behavior. Why? Because Hoski didn’t know whether the messenger was a legitimate runner of the Buffalo Society or an FBI informer. If the messenger was not FBI, the agency would quickly send someone to tail the messenger.

Thus Hoski had waited for the second tail to arrive. And when the van had parked down the street, Hoski had walked over to make sure the driver was in fact FBI, watching from the doorway, and not someone with a key and business inside. Then, with the legitimacy of the messenger confirmed by the FBI reaction, he’d gone into the bar and received his message.

What next? Leaphorn resumed reading. The following day the agency had doubled its watch on Hoski. The day was routine, except that Hoski had walked to a neighborhood shopping center and, at a J.C. Penney store, had bought a blue-and-white-checked nylon windbreaker, a blue cloth hat and navy-blue trousers.

The next day the routine shattered. A little after 3 P.M. an ambulance arrived at Hoskis apartment building. Hoski, holding a bloody bath towel to his face, was helped into the vehicle and taken to the emergency room at Memorial Hospital. The ambulance attendants reported that they found Hoski sitting on the steps just inside the entrance waiting for them. The police emergency operator revealed that a man had called fifteen minutes earlier, claimed he had cut himself and was bleeding to death, and asked for an ambulance. At the hospital, the attending physician reported that the patients right scalp had been slashed. Hoski said he had slipped with a bottle in his hand and fallen on the broken glass. He was released with seventeen stitches closing the wound, and a bandage which covered much of his face. He took a cab home, called Safety Systems, Inc., and announced that he had cut his head and would have to miss work for two or three days.

At mid-morning the next day, he emerged from the apartment wearing the clothing purchased at J. C. Penney and carrying a bulging pillowcase. He walked slowly, with one rest at a bus stop, to the Bendix laundromat where he had routinely done his laundry. In the laundry, Hoski washed the contents of the pillowcase, placed the wet wash in a dryer, disappeared into the rest room for about four minutes, emerged and waited for the drying cycle to be completed, and then carried the dried laundry in the pillowcase back to his apartment.

Two days later, a young Indian, who hadn’t been observed entering the apartment building, emerged and left in a taxi. This had aroused suspicion. The following day, Hoskis apartment was entered and proved to be empty. Evidence found included a new blue-and-white-checked nylon windbreaker, a blue cloth hat, navy-blue trousers and the remains of a facial bandage, which since it was not stained by medications-was presumed to have been used as a disguise.

Leaphorn read through the rest of it rapidly. Rosemary Rita Oliveras had appeared two days later at Hoskis apartment house, and had called his employer, and then had gone to the police to report him missing. The FBI statement described her as distraught apparently convinced that subject is the victim of foul play. The rest of it was appendix material interviews with Rosemary Rita Oliveras, the transcripts of tapped telephone calls, odds and ends of accumulated evidence. Leaphorn read all of it. He sorted the materials into their folders, fitted the folders back into the accordion file, and sat staring at nothing in particular.

It was obvious enough how Hoski had done it. When the FBI’s reaction had proved the messenger legitimate, he had gone to a department store and bought easy-to-recognize, easy-to-match clothing. Then he had called a friend. (Not a friend, Leaphorn corrected himself. He had called an accomplice. Hoski had no friends. In all those months in Washington he had seen no one except Rosemary Rita Oliveras.) He had told the accomplice exactly which items to buy, and to have his face bandaged as if his right scalp had been slashed open. He had told him to come early and unobserved to the laundromat, to lock himself into a toilet booth and to wait. When Hoski had appeared, this man had simply assumed Hoskis role had carried the laundry back to Hoskis apartment and waited. And inside the men’s room booth, Hoski had dressed in a set of clothing the man must have brought for him, and removed the bandage, and covered his sewn scalp with a wig or a hat, and vanished. Away from Washington, and from FBI agents, and from Rosemary Rita Oliveras. He must have been tempted to call her, Leaphorn thought. The only thing that Hoski hadn’t planned on was falling in love with this woman. But he had.

Something in those telephone transcripts said he had. They were terse, but you found love somehow in what was said, and left unsaid. But Hoski hadn’t contacted her. He had left Rosemary Rita Oliveras without a word. The FBI would have known if he had tipped her off. She was an uncomplicated woman. She couldn’t have faked the frantic worry, or the hurt.

Leaphorn lit another cigarette. He thought of the nature of the man the FBI called Hoski; a man smart enough to use the FBI as Hoski had done and then to arrange that clever escape. What had that taken? Leaphorn imagined how it must have been done. First, the call to the ambulance to minimize the risk. Then the broken glass gripped carefully, placed against the cringing skin. The brain telling the muscle to perform the act that every instinct screamed against. God! What sort of man was Hoski?

Leaphorn turned back to the file. The last items were three poorly printed propaganda leaflets left at the scenes of various Buffalo Society crimes. The rhetoric was uncompromising anger. The white man had attempted genocide against the Buffalo People. But the Great Power of the Sun was just. The Sun had ordained the Buffalo Society as his avenger. When seven symbolic crimes had been avenged, white men everywhere would be stricken. The earth would be cleansed of them. Then the sacred buffalo herds and the people they nourished would again flourish and populate the land.

The crimes were listed, with the number of victims, in the order they would be avenged.

Most of them were familiar. The Wounded Knee Massacre was there, and the ghastly slaughter at Sand Creek, and the mutilation of Acoma males after their pueblo stronghold fell to the Spanish. But the first crime was unfamiliar to Leaphorn. It was an attack on a Kiowa encampment in West Texas by a force of cavalry and Texas Rangers. The pamphlet called it the Olds Prairie Murders, said it came when the men were away hunting buffalo, and listed the dead as eleven children and three adults. That was the smallest casualty total. The death toll increased down the list, culminating with the Subjugation of the Navajos.

For that, the pamphleteer listed a death toll of 3,500 children and 2,500 adults. Probably, Leaphorn thought, as fair a guess as any. He put the pamphlet aside and found a sort of anxious uneasiness again intruding into his thoughts. He was overlooking something.

Something important. Abruptly he knew it was related to what Mrs. Cigarette had told him.

Something about where she had sat, with her head against the stone, while she had listened to the voices in the earth. But what had she said? Just enough to let Leaphorn know that he had guessed wrong about which of the cul-de-sacs in the mesa cliff she had used for this communion with the stone. She had not used the one closest to the Tso hogan. Anna Atcitty had led her up a sheep trail beside the mesa.

Leaphorn closed his eyes, grimaced with concentration, remembering how he had stood on the mesa rim, looking down on the Tso hogan, on the wagon track leading to it, on the brush arbor. There had been a cul-de-sac below him and another perhaps two hundred yards to his left, where sheep had once been penned. Leaphorn could see it again in memory the sheep track angling gradually away from the wagon road. And then he was suddenly, chillingly aware of what his subconscious had been trying to tell him. If Listening Woman had sat there, she would have been plainly visible to the killer as he approached the hogan down the wagon track and even more obvious as he left. Did that mean Mrs.

Cigarette had lied? Leaphorn wasted hardly a second on that. Mrs. Cigarette had not lied.

It meant the wagon road was not the way the killer had come and gone. He had come out of the canyon, and departed into it. And that meant that if he emerged again, he would find Father Tso and Theodora Adams just where he had found Hosteen Tso and Anna Atcitty.

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T

he nucleus of the cloud formed about noon over the Nevada-Arizona border. By the time it trailed its dark-blue shadow across the Grand Canyon, it had built into a tower more than a mile from its sparkling white top to its flat, dark base. It crossed the southern slopes of Short Mountain at mid afternoon, growing fast. Fierce internal up-drafts pushed its cap above thirty thousand feet. There the mist droplets turned to ice, and fell, and melted, and were caught again in updrafts and soared into the frigid stratosphere, only to fall again increasing in size with this churning and producing immense charges of static electricity which caused the cloud to mutter and grumble with thunder and produce occasional explosive bolts of lightning. These linked cloud with mountain or mesa top for brilliant seconds, and sent waves of echoes booming down the canyons below. And finally, the icy droplets glittering at the cloud-top against the deep-blue sky became too heavy for the winds, and too large to evaporate in the warm air below. Then thin curtains of falling ice and water lowered from the black base of the cloud and at last touched the ground. Thus, east of Short Mountain, the cloud became a male rain.

Leaphorn stopped the carryall, turned off the ignition and listened to it coming. The sun slanted into the falling water, creating a gaudy double rainbow which seemed to move steadily toward him, narrowing its arch as it came in accordance with rainbow optics.

There was sound now, the muted approaching roar of billions of particles of ice and water striking stone. The first huge drop struck the roof of Leaphorns carryall. Plong! Plong-plong! And a torrent of rain and hail swept over the vehicle. The screen of falling water dimmed the landscape for a moment, the droplets reflecting the sun like a rhinestone curtain. And then the light was drowned. Leaphorn sat, engulfed in sound. He glanced at his watch, and waited, enjoying the storm as he enjoyed all things right and natural not thinking for a moment about any of the unnatural affairs that involved him. He put aside the sense of urgency that had brought him down this wagon track much faster than it could wisely be driven. It took a fraction over seven minutes for the storm to pass Leaphorns carryall. He started the engine and drove through the diminishing shower. A mile short of the Tso place, runoff water flashing down an arroyo had cut deeply into its bank. Leaphorn climbed out of the carryall and examined the road. A couple of hours with a shovel would make it passable again. Now it was not. It would be quicker to walk.

Leaphorn walked. The sun emerged. In places the sandstone landscape was littered with hail. In places the hot stone steamed, the cold rain water evaporating to form patches of ground mist. The air was cold, smelling washed and clean. The Tso hogan, as Leaphorn approached it, appeared deserted.

He stopped a hundred yards short of the buildings and shouted, calling first for Tso and then for the girl. Silence. The rocks steamed. Leaphorn shouted again. He walked to the hogan. The door stood open.

He peered into its dark interior. Two bedrolls, side by side. Theodora Adams’s overnight case and duffel bag. The scant luggage of Father Tso. A box of groceries, cooking utensils. Everything was neat. Everything in order. Leaphorn turned from the doorway and surveyed the surroundings. The rain had swept the ground clean of tracks, and nothing had been here since the rain had stopped. Father Tso and Theodora had left the hogan before the storm arrived. And they had been too far afield to return to its shelter when the rain began. But where could they go? Behind the hogan, the wall of the mesa rose. It was mostly cliff, but breaks made it easy enough to climb in half a dozen places. To the north, northwest and northeast, the ground fell away into a labyrinth of vertical-walled canyons which he knew drained, eventually, into the San Juan River. The track he had taken circled in from the south, through a wilderness of eroded stone. Tso and the girl had probably climbed the mesa, or wandered southward, though the canyons would make forbidding, and dangerous, walking.

A faint breeze stirred the air and brought the distant sound of thunder from the retreating storm. The sun was low now, warm against the side of Leaphorns face. He looked down the wagon track toward the place where Listening Woman had seen her vision and had been, for some reason, herself unseen by a murderer. So the murderer had not used the only easy exit route. If he had climbed the mesa, it, too, would have offered him an open view of the woman. That left only the canyons. Which made no sense. Leaphorn looked northward. A reasonably agile man could climb down off this bench to the canyon floor, but canyons would lead him nowhere. Only into an endless labyrinth-deeper and deeper into the sheer-walled maze.

Leaphorn turned suddenly, ducked through the hogan door and sorted through Tsos supplies. His groceries included about twenty cans of meats, fruits and vegetables, two-thirds of a twenty-pound sack of potatoes, and an assortment of dried beans and other staples. Tso had come, obviously, for a long stay. Leaphorn checked the girls duffel bag, and the priests suitcases, and found nothing that seemed helpful.

Then as he looked toward the hogan door, he saw marks on the floor which were almost too faint to register. They were visible only because of the angle of light between Leaphorn and the doorway. They were nothing more than the damp paw prints of a very large dog left on the hard-packed earthen floor. But they were enough to tell Leaphorn that he had failed in carrying out his instructions to take care of Theodora Adams.

Leaphorn studied the hogan floor again, his cheek to the packed earth as he examined the stirred dust against the light. But he learned little. The dog had evidently come here during the rain or immediately after it. And someone had been with the dog, since several of its damp footprints had been scuffed. That could have been Goldrims, or Tso and Adams, or perhaps all three. The dog might even have arrived pre-rain, and have run out into the rain, and returned wet-footed. And all had left while enough rain was still falling to erase their tracks.

He stood at the door. Too much coincidence. Leaphorn didn’t believe in it. He believed nothing happened without cause. Everything intermeshed, from the mood of a man, to the flight of the corn beetle, to the music of the wind. It was the Navajo philosophy, this concept of interwoven harmony, and it was bred into Joe Leaphorns bones. There had to be a reason for the death of Hosteen Tso, and it had to be connected with why Goldrims or at least Goldrims's dog had been drawn to the Tso hogan. Leaphorn tried to think it through. He knew Listening Woman had sensed some unusual evil behind the troubled spirit of Hosteen Tso. She had decided to recommend that a Mountain Way be performed for the old man, and that the Black Rain Chant also should be done. It was an unusual prescription. Both of the curing ceremonials were ritual recreations of a portion of the myths that taught how the Dinee had emerged from the underworld and become human clans. The Mountain Way would have been intended to restore Hosteen Tsos psyche with the harmony that had been disrupted by his witnessing some sort of sacrilegious taboo violation the disrespect to the holy sand paintings probably. But why the Black Rain Chant? Leaphorn should have asked her more about that. It was an obscure ritual, rarely performed. He remembered that its name came from the creation of rain. First Coyote had a role in it, Leaphorn recalled. And a fire played a part somehow. But how could that be involved with the curing of Hosteen Tso? He leaned against the hogan doorframe, recalling the lessons of his boyhood. Hosteen Coyote had visited Fire Man, and had tricked him, and had stolen a bundle of burning sticks and escaped with the treasure tied to his bushy tail. And in running, he had spread flames all across Dinetah, and the Holy Land of the People was burning, and the Holy People had met to consider the crisis.

Something clicked suddenly into place. The hero of this particular myth adventure was First Frog. Hosteen Frog had used his magic, inflated himself with water, and carried aloft by First Crane-had produced black rain to save Dinetah from fire. And Listening Woman had mentioned that Hosteen Tso had killed a frog or caused it to be killed by a falling rock.

Leaphorn frowned again. Killing a frog was a taboo, but a minor one. A personal chant would cure the guilt and restore beauty. Why had the death of this frog been weighted so heavily? Because, Leaphorn guessed, Tso associated it with the other, grimmer sacrilege.

Had there been frogs near the place where the sand paintings were desecrated?

Leaphorn glanced again at the mesa, where his common sense suggested that Father Tso and Theodora Adams must have gone and away from the dead-end waste of canyons which led absolutely nowhere except if you followed them far under the drowning waters of Lake Powell. Yet, Leaphorn thought, if the man who had killed Hosteen Tso had failed to see Listening Woman, he must have gone into the canyons. And if there was a secret place nearby where the sand paintings and the medicine bundle of the Way to Cure the Worlds End had waited out the generations, it might well be in a deep, dry cave and caves again meant the canyons. Finally, the mesa offered no water, and thus no possibility of frogs. Leaphorn walking fast headed for the canyon rim.

The branch canyon that skirted past the Tso hogan was perhaps eighty vertical feet from the cap rock to its sandy bottom. The trail that connected the two had been cut by goats at a steep angle and at the bottom Leaphorn found tracks which proved to him he had guessed right. The rocks were dry now and the humans humanlike had avoided the rainwater puddles between them. But the dog had not. At several places Leaphorn found traces left by its wet paws. They led down the narrow slot, and here a narrow strip of sand was wet. Two persons had stepped in it perhaps three. Large feet and a small foot.

Adams and Father Tso? Adams and Goldrims? Had the party included a third member, who had stepped from rock to rock and left no footprints? Leaphorn turned to the spring. It was little more than a seep, emerging from a moss-covered crack and dripping into a catch basin which Tso had probably dug out. There were no frogs here, and no sign of a rock slide. Leaphorn tasted the water. It was cold, with a slightly mineral taste. He drank deeply, wiped his mouth, and began walking as quietly as he could down the hard-packed sand of the canyon bottom.

» 14 «

Leaphorn had been walking almost three hours, slowly, cautiously, trying to follow tracks in the gathering darkness, when he heard the sound. It stopped him, and he held his breath, listening. It was a soprano sound, made by something living human or otherwise. It came from a long distance, lasted perhaps three or four seconds, cut off abruptly in mid note, and was followed by a confusion of echoes. Leaphorn stood on the sand of the canyon bottom, analyzing the diminishing echoes. A human voice? Perhaps the high-pitched scream of a bobcat? It seemed to come from the place where this canyon drained into a larger canyon about 150 yards below him. But whether it originated up or down the larger canyon, or across it, or above it, Leaphorn could only guess. The echoes had been chaotic.

He listened a moment longer and heard nothing. The sound seemed to have startled even the insects and the insect-hunting evening birds. Leaphorn began to run as quietly as he could toward the canyon mouth, the whisper of his boot soles on the sand the only sound in an eerie silence. At the junction he stopped, looking right and left. He had been in the canyons long enough to develop an unusual and unsettling sense of disorientation of not knowing exactly where he was in terms of either direction or landmarks. He understood its cause: a horizon which rose vertically overhead and the constant turning of the corridors sliced through the stone. Understanding it made it no more comfortable.

Leaphorn, who had never been lost in his life, didn’t know exactly where he was. He could tell he was moving approximately northward. But he wasn’t sure he could retrace his way directly back to the Tso hogan without wasting steps. That uncertainty added to his general uneasiness. Far overhead, the cliff tops still glowed with the light of the sunsets afterglow, but here it was almost dark. Leaphorn sat on a boulder, fished a cigarette out of a package in his shirt pocket, and held it under his nose. He inhaled the aroma of the tobacco, and then slipped it back into the pack. He would not make a light. He simply sat, letting his senses work for him. He was hungry. He put that thought aside. On earth level the breeze had died, as it often did in the desert twilight. Here, two hundred feet below the earths surface, the air moved down-canyon, pressed by the cooling atmosphere from the slopes above. Leaphorn heard the song of insects, the chirping of rock crickets, and now and then the call of an owl. A bullbat swept past him, hunting mosquitoes, oblivious of the motionless man. Once again Leaphorn became aware of the distant steady murmur of the river. It was nearer now, and the noise of water over rock was funneled and concentrated by the cliffs. No more than a mile and a half away, he guessed. Normally the thin, dry air of desert country carries few smells. But the air at canyon bottom was damp, so Leaphorn could identify the smell of wet sand, the resinous aroma of cedar, the vague perfume of piñon needles, and a dozen scents too faint for identification. The afterglow faded from the cliff tops.

Time ticked away, bringing to the waiting man sounds and smells, but no repetition of the shout, if shout it had been, and nothing to hint at where Goldrims might have gone. Stars appeared in the slot overhead. First one, glittering alone, and then a dozen, and hundreds, and millions. The stars of the constellation Ursa Minor became visible, and Leaphorn felt the relief of again knowing his direction exactly. Abruptly he pushed himself upright, listening. From his left, down the dark canyon, came a faint rhythm of sound. Frogs greeting the summer night. He walked slowly, placing his feet carefully, moving down the canyon toward the almost imperceptible sound of the frogs. The darkness gave him an advantage. While it canceled sight, the night magnified the value of hearing. If it had kept Tsos secrets for a hundred years, the cave must be hidden from sight. But if there were people in it, they would unless they slept produce sound. The darkness would hide him, and he could move almost without noise down the sand of the canyon floor.

But there was also a disadvantage. The dog. If the dog was out in the canyon, it would smell him two hundred yards away. Leaphorn assumed that the cave would be somewhere up the cliff wall, as caves tended to be, and in this damp air, his scent would probably not rise. If the dog was in the cave, Leaphorn could go undetected.

Nevertheless, he drew his pistol and walked with it in his hand, its hammer held on half cock and the safety catch off. He walked tensely, stopping every few yards both to listen and to make sure that his breathing remained slow and low.

He heard very little: the faint sound of his own boot soles placed carefully on the sand, the distant barking of a coyote hunting somewhere on the surface above, the occasional call of a night bird, and finally, as the evening breeze rose, the breathing of air moving around the rocks, all against the background music of frog song. Once he was startled by a sudden scurrying of a rodent. And then, mid stride, he heard a voice.

He stood motionless, straining to hear more. It had been a mans voice-coming from somewhere down the canyon, saying something terse. Three or four quick words.

Leaphorn looked around him, identifying his location. Just down the canyon bottom, he could make out the shape of a granite outcropping. The canyon bent here, turning abruptly to the right around the granite. To his left, at his elbow, the cliff wall split, forming a narrow declivity in which brush grew. Checking his surroundings was an automatic precaution, typical of Leaphorn making sure that he could find this place again in daylight. That done, he renewed his concentrated listening.

He heard in the darkness the sound of running, and of panting breath. It was coming directly toward him. In a split second the adrenal glands flooded his blood. Leaphorn managed to thumb back the pistol hammer to full cock, and half raise the .38. Then looming out of the darkness came the bulk of the dog, eyes and teeth reflecting the starlight in a strange wet whiteness. Leaphorn was able to lunge sideways toward the split cliff, and jerk the trigger. Amid the thunder of the pistol shot, the dog was on him. It struck him shoulder-high. Because of Leaphorns lunge, the impact was glancing. Instead of being knocked on his back, the animal atop him, he was spun sideways against the cliff.

The beasts teeth tore at his jacket instead of his throat, and the momentum of its leap carried it past him. Leaphorn found himself in the crevasse, scrambling frantically upward over boulders and brush. The dog, snarling now for the first time, had recovered itself and was into the crevasse after him. Leaphorn pulled himself desperately upward, with the dog just below him far enough below him to make Leaphorns dangling legs safe by a matter of perhaps a yard. He gripped a root of some sort with his right hand and felt carefully with his left and found a higher handhold. He squirmed upward, reaching a narrow shelf. There the dog couldn’t possibly reach him. He turned and looked down. In this crevasse, the darkness of the canyon bottom became total. He could see nothing below him. But the animal was there; its snarl had become a frustrated yipping. Leaphorn took a deep breath, held it a moment, released it recovering from his panic. He felt the nausea of a system overloaded with adrenaline. There was no time for sickness, or for the anger which was now replacing fear. He was safe for the moment from the dog, but he was totally exposed to the dogs owner. He made a quick inventory of his situation. His pistol was gone. The animal had struck him as he swung it upward and had knocked it from his hand. He hadn’t, apparently, hit the dog, but the blast of the shot must have at least surprised and deafened it and given Leaphorn time. No worry about concealment now. He unhooked his flashlight from his belt and surveyed his situation. The dog was standing, its forepaws against the rock, just below him. It was as huge as Leaphorn expected. He was neither knowledgeable nor particularly interested in dogs, but this one, he guessed, was a mongrel cross between some of the biggest breeds; Irish wolfhound and Great Dane perhaps. Whatever the mix, it had produced a shaggy coat, a frame taller than a mans when the dog stood as it now stood, on its hind legs, and a massive, ugly head. Leaphorn inspected the declivity into which he had climbed. It slanted steeply upward, apparently an old crack opened by an earth tremor in the cliff. Runoff water had drained down it, debris had tumbled into it, and an assortment of cactus, creosote bush, rabbit brush and weeds had taken root amid the boulders. It had two advantages-it offered a hiding place and was too steep for the dog to climb. Its disadvantage overrode both of these. It was a trap. The only way out was past the dog. Leaphorn felt around him for a rock of proper throwing size. The one he managed to pull loose from between the two boulders on which he was perched was smaller than he wanted about the size of a small, flattened orange. He shifted the flashlight to his left hand and the rock to his right, and examined his target. The dog was snarling again. Its teeth and its eyes gleamed in the reflected light. He must hit it in the forehead, and hit it hard. He hurled the rock.

It seemed to strike the dog between its left eye and ear. The animal yelped and retreated down the slope.

At first he thought the dog had disappeared. Then he saw it, eyes reflecting the light, just outside the mouth of the crack. Still within accurate rock range. He fished behind him for another rock, and then quickly flicked off the light. On the canyon floor behind the dog he saw a glimmer of brightness a flashlight beam bobbing with the walking pace of the person who held it.

There’s the dog, a voice said. Don’t put the light on it, Tull. The son-of-a-bitch has a gun.

The flashlight beam abruptly blinked out. Leaphorn eased himself silently upward. He heard the same voice talking quietly to the dog. And then a second voice: He must be up in that crack there, the man called Tull said. The dogs treed him.

The first voice said, I told you that dog would earn his keep.

Up to now he’s been a pain in the butt, Tull said. The son-of-a-bitch scares me.

No reason for that, the first voice said. Lynch trained him himself. He was the pride of Safety Systems. The man laughed. Or he was before I started slipping him food. Hell, Tull said. Look what I just stepped on. Its his gun! The dog took the bastards gun away from him.

There was a brief silence.

Its the right one all right. Its been fired, Tull said.

The flashlight went on again. Leaphorns reaching hand was exploring an opening between the boulders. He pulled himself further into the slot, stood cautiously and looked downward. He could see a circle of yellow light on the sandy canyon bottom and the legs of two men. Then the light flashed upward, its beam moving over the rocks and brush below him. He ducked back. The beam flashed past, lighting the space in which he stood with its reflection. To the left of where he was crouching, and above him, an immense slab had split away from the face of the cliff. Behind it there would be better cover and the faint possibility of a route to climb upward.

The first voice was shouting up toward him.

You might as well come on down, the voice said. Well hold the dog.

Leaphorn stood silent.

Come on, the voice said. You cant get out of there and if you don’t come down were going to get sore about it.

We just want to talk to you, the Tull voice said. Who the hell are you and what are you doing here?

The voices paused, waiting for an answer. The words echoed up and down the canyon, then died away.

Its a police-issued pistol, the first voice said. Thirty-eight revolver. There’s just one shot fired. The one we heard.

A cop?

Yeah, Id guess so. Maybe the one that came nosing around the old mans hogan.

He’s not going to come down, Tull said. I don’t think he’s coming down.

No, First Voice said.

You want me to go up and get him?

Hell, no. He’d brain you with a rock. He’s above you and you couldn’t see it coming in the dark.

Yeah, Tull said. So we wait for morning?

No. Were going to be busy in the morning, First Voice said. There was silence then. The flashlight beam moved up the crevasse, back and forth, to Leaphorns hiding place, and then above it Leaphorn turned and looked up. Far above his head the yellow light reflected from sections of unbroken cliff. But the cleft, he saw, went all the way to the top.

Four cautious steps into the opening and the flash caught him. He scrambled desperately, blinded by the beam, toward the crevasse behind the slab. There was a sudden explosion of gunshots, deafening in the closed space, and the sound of bullets whining off the stones around him. Then he was behind the slab, panting, the flashlight beam reflecting off the cliff.

What do you think? Tull asked.

Damn. I think we missed him.

He’s sure not going to come down now, Tull said.

Hey, buddy, First Voice said. You’re stuck in a box. If you don’t come down, were going to set this brush on fire here at the bottom and burn you out. Hear that?

Leaphorn said nothing. He was considering alternatives. He was sure that if he came out they would kill him. Would they build the fire? Maybe. Could he survive it? This slot would give him some protection from the flame, but the fire would roar up the crevasse much like a chimney, exhausting the oxygen. If the heat didn’t kill him, suffocation would.

Go ahead and start it, First Voice said. I told you he’s not coming down.

Well, hell, Tull said. Don’t a fire draw a crowd out here?

Voice One laughed. The only light that’ll get out of this canyon will reflect straight up, he said. There’s nobody in forty miles to see it, and by morning the smoke will be all gone.

Here’s some dry grass, Tull said. Once it gets going, the damp stuff will catch. Its not that wet.

Leaphorn had made his decision without consciously doing so. He would not climb down to be shot. The men below him started the blaze in a mat of brush and canyon-bottom driftwood caught at the crevasse opening. In moments, the smell of burning creosote bush and piñon resin reached Leaphorns nostrils. The fire below would be interfering with the men’s vision. He looked down at them. The dog stood behind them, backed nervously away from the blaze, but still looking up its pointed ears erect and its eyes reflecting yellow in the firelight. To its left stood a large man in jeans and a denim jacket. He was holding a military-model automatic rifle cradled over his arm and using the other hand to shield his face from the heat. The face looked lopsided, somehow distorted, and the one eye Leaphorn could see stared upward toward him curiously. Tull. The second man was smaller. He wore a long-sleeved shirt and no jacket, his hair was black and cut fairly short, and the firelight glittered off gold-rimmed glasses. And behind the glasses Leaphorn saw a bland Navajo face. The light was weak and flickering, the glimpse was momentary, and the gold-rimmed glasses might have tricked the imagination. But Leaphorn found himself facing the fact that the man trying to kill him looked like Father Benjamin Tso of the Order of Friars Minor.

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The problem would be flame, heat and lack of oxygen. Behind this slab, the flames would not reach him unless they were drawn in by some freakish draft. That left heat, which could kill him just as surely. And suffocation. The light from the fire below grew, flickering at first and then steady. Leaphorn worked his way further behind the slab, away from the light. His boot sole suddenly splashed into water. The slab had formed a catch basin which had trapped the days rain water as it poured down the cliff face. Behind him now the flames were making a steady roar as brush higher up the crevasse heated and exploded into fire. He pulled himself into the water. It was cool. He soaked his shirt, his pants, his boots. Through the slot behind him now he could see only fire. A gust of heat struck him, a searing torch on his cheek. He ducked his face into the water, held it there until his lungs cried for air. When he raised his face, he drew in a breath slowly and cautiously. The air was hot now, and his ears were filled with the roar of the fire. As he looked through slitted eyes, weeds in the lip of the slot wilted suddenly, then exploded into bright yellow flame. His denims were steaming. He splashed more water on them. The heat was intense, but his lungs told him it would be suffocation that would kill him unless he could find some source of oxygen. He climbed frantically between the cliff face and the inner surface of slab, working his way away from the fire. The first breath he took seared his lungs. But there was a draft now, sucking past his face. It came not from the flames but from somewhere, below, pulled through the slot by the heat-caused vacuum.

Leaphorn forced himself into the increasingly narrow gap-away from the furnace and toward this source of blessed air. Finally he could go no farther. His head was jammed in a vise of stone. The heat varied, now unbearably intense, now merely scalding. He could feel steam from his soaked pants legs hot on his inner thighs. The fire was making its own wind, sucking air extremely hot air past his face. If the draft changed, it would pull fire up this slot and char him like a moth. Or when his clothing dried and. ignited, this draft of oxygen would turn him into a torch. Leaphorn shut this thought out of his mind and concentrated on another thought. If he stayed alive, he would get his rifle, and he would kill the dog and the man with the lopsided face and, most of all, he would kill Goldrims. He would kill Goldrims. He would kill Goldrims. And thus Joe Leaphorn endured.

The time came when the roar of fire diminished, and the draft of air around his face faded, and the heat rose to a furnace intensity. Leaphorn thought, then, that he would not survive. Consciousness slipped away. When it returned, the noise of burning was nothing more than a crackling, and he could hear voices. Sometimes they sounded faint and far away, and sometimes Leaphorn could understand the words. And finally the voices stopped, and time passed, and it was dark again. Leaphorn decided he would try to move, and found that he could, and inched his head out of the crevasse. His nostrils were filled with the smell of heat and ashes. But there was little fire. Most of the light here came from a log which had tumbled into the crack from above. It burned fitfully a hundred yards overhead. Leaphorn eased himself downward, toward the pool of water. It was warm now, almost hot, and much of it had evaporated. Leaphorn put his face into what remained and drank greedily. It tasted of charcoal. Hot as the fire had been it had not been enough to substantially raise the temperature of the massive living stone of the cliff which was still cool and made the temperature here bearable. In the flickering light, Leaphorn sat and inspected himself. He would have blisters, especially on one ankle where the skin had been exposed, and perhaps on his wrists and neck and face. His chest felt uncomfortable but there was no real pain. He had survived. The problem now was just as it had been how to escape this trap.

He eased his way to the edge of the slab and peered around it. Below, logs and brush were still burning at a dozen places, and hot coals glowed at a hundred others. He could see neither dog nor man. Perhaps they were gone for good. Perhaps they were merely waiting for the fire to cool enough to climb the crevasse and make sure he was dead.

Leaphorn thought about it. It must have seemed impossible, seen from below, for any living thing to survive in that flame-filled crevasse. Yet he couldn’t quite convince himself that the two men would take the risk. He would try to climb out.

He burned himself a half-dozen times before he learned to detect and avoid the hot spots left by the fire. But by the time he was 150 feet above the canyon floor heat was no longer the problem. Now the cleft had narrowed but the climb was almost vertical. Climbing involved inching upward a few feet and then an extended pause to rest muscles aching with fatigue. The climb used up the night. He finally pulled himself onto the cap rock in the gray light of dawn and lay, utterly spent, with his face against the cold stone. He allowed himself a few minutes to rest and then moved into the cover of a cliff-side juniper.

There he extracted his walkie-talkie from its case on his belt, switched on the receiver and sat, getting his bearings. His transmission range was perhaps ten miles hopelessly short for reaching any Navajo Police receiver. But Leaphorn tried it anyway. He broadcast his location and a call for help. There was no response. The Arizona State Police band was transmitting a description of a truck. The New Mexico State Police transmitter at Farmington was silent. He could hear the Utah Highway Patrol dispatcher at Moab, but not well enough to understand anything. The Federal Law Enforcement channel was sending what seemed to be a list of identifications. The Navajo State Police dispatcher at Tuba City, like the ASP radio, was giving someone a truck description a camper truck, a big one apparently, with tandem rear wheels.

Leaphorn had himself placed now. The mesa that overlooked the Tso hogan was on the southwestern horizon, perhaps three miles away. Beyond that was his carryall, with his rifle and a radio transmitter strong enough to reach Tuba City. But at least two canyons cut the plateau between him and the hogan. Getting there would take hours. The sooner he started the better.

If there was any life on this segment of the plateau it wasn’t visible in the early morning light. Except for whitish outcrops of limestone, the cap rock was a dark red igneous rock which supported in its cracks and crevasses a sparse growth of dry-country vegetation. A few hundred yards west, a low mesa blocked off the horizon. Leaphorn examined it, wondering if he’d have to cross it to reach his vehicle.

From the radio the pleasant feminine voice of the Tuba City dispatcher came faintly. It completed the description of the camper truck, lapsed into silence, and began another message. Leaphorns mind was concentrating on what his eyes were seeing seeking a way up the mesa wall. But it registered the word hostages. Suddenly Leaphorn was listening.

The radio was silent again. He willed it to speak. The rim of the horizon over New Mexico was bright now with streaks of yellow. A morning breeze moved against his face. The radio spoke faintly, with the meaning lost in the moving air. Leaphorn squatted behind the juniper and held the speaker against his ear.

All units, the voice said. We have more information. All units copy. Confirming three men involved. Confirming all three were armed. Witnesses saw one rifle and two pistols. In addition to the Boy Scouts, the hostages are two adult males. They are identified as Discontinue this. Discontinue this. All units. All police units are ordered to evacuate the area of the Navajo Reservation north of U.S. Highway 160 and east of U.S. Highway 89, south of the northern border of the reservation, and west of the New Mexico border. We have instructions from the kidnappers that if police are seen in that area the hostages will be killed. Repeating. All police units are ordered . . .

Leaphorn was only half conscious of the voice repeating itself. Could this explain what Goldrims was doing? Had he been setting up a Buffalo Society kidnapping? Preparing its base a hiding place for hostages? Why else would police be ordered out of this section of the reservation?

The radio completed its repetition of the warning and finished its interrupted description of the male adult hostages, both leaders of a troop of Scouts from Santa Fe. It launched into a description of the hostage boys.

Juvenile subject one is identified as Norbert Juan Gomez, age twelve, four feet, eleven inches tall, weight about eighty pounds, black hair, black eyes. All juvenile subjects wearing Boy Scout uniforms.

Juvenile subject two is Tommy Pearce, age thirteen, five feet tall, weight ninety, brown hair, brown eyes.

Juvenile subject three . . .

They all sound pretty much alike, Leaphorn thought. Turned into statistics. Changed by exposure to violence from children into juvenile subjects three, four, five and six, to be measured in pounds and inches and color of hair.

Juvenile subject eight, Theodore middle initial F. Markham, age thirteen, five feet two inches, weight about one hundred pounds, blond hair, blue eyes, pale complexion.

Leaphorn converted juvenile subject eight into a pale blond boy he had noticed last summer watching a rodeo at Window Rock. The boy had stood at the arena enclosure, one foot on the bottom rail, his hair bleached almost white, his face peeling from old sunburn, his attention on the efforts of a Navajo cowboy trying to tie the forelegs of a calf he had bulldogged.

Juvenile subject nine is Milton Richard Silver, the radio intoned, and Leaphorns mind converted nine into Leaphorns own nephew, who lived in Flagstaff, whose blue jeans were chronically disfigured with plastic model cement and whose elbows were disfigured from the scars of skateboard accidents. And that thought led to another one. Tuba City would remember he had gone to the Tso hogan. They’d be trying to reach him to call him out of the prohibited zone. But that didn’t matter. Goldrims knew he was here. Knew he had been here before the warning. What mattered was to get moving. To get his rifle.

Leaphorn walked rapidly, flinching at first from the stiffness in calves and ankles. He considered dropping his equipment belt, leaving binoculars, radio, flashlight and first-aid kit behind to save the weight. But though the radio and binoculars were heavy, he might need them. The radio had completed its descriptions of the hostage Scouts with juvenile subject eleven and was engaged in responding to questions and transmitting orders. From this Leaphorn pieced together a little more of what had happened. Three armed men, all-apparently Indians, had appeared the night before at one of the many Boy Scout troop encampments scattered around the mouth of Canyon de Chelly. They had arrived in two trucks a camper and a van. They had herded the two Scout leaders and eleven of the boys into the camper and had left two more adults and seven other Scouts tied and locked in the van.

Leaphorn frowned. Why take some hostages and leave others? And why that number?

The question instantly answered itself. He remembered the propaganda leaflet in the FBI file at Albuquerque. First on the list of atrocities to be avenged was the Olds Prairie Murders, the victims of which had been three adults and eleven children. The thought chilled him. But why hadn’t they taken three adults? Theodora Adams. Was she the third?

The Buffalo Society evidently had planned to dramatize the deaths of eleven Kiowa children from a century ago by taking eleven Boy Scouts hostage. They’d known this would launch an international orgy of news coverage, would make for nationwide suspense. There would be television interviews with weeping mothers and distraught fathers. The whole world would be watching this one. The whole world would be asking if an Indian named Kelongy simply wanted to recall an old atrocity or if his sense of justice would demand a perfect balance. Leaphorn was wondering about this himself when he heard the dog.

It came from above him on the cap of the mesa an angry, frustrated sound something between a snarl and a bark. He had forgotten the dog. The sound stopped him in his tracks. Then he saw the animal almost directly above him. It stood with its front paws on the very edge of the rimrock, shoulders hunched, teeth bared. It barked again, then turned abruptly and ran along the cliff away from him, then back toward him, apparently looking frantically for a way down. The creature was even bigger than he remembered it, looming in the yellow firelight of the night before. At any minute it would find a way down a rock slide, a deer trail, almost any break in the cliff which would lead to the talus slope below.

Leaphorn became aware of a cold knot of fear in his stomach. He looked around him, hoping to see something he could use for a club. He broke a limb from a dead juniper, although it was hopelessly inadequate to stop the animal. Then he turned and ran stiffly back toward the main-stem canyon. It was the only place where having hands could give him an advantage over an adversary with four legs and tearing canine teeth. He stopped at a twisted little cedar rooted into the rock about six feet from the lip of the cliff. Behind it he hurriedly unlaced his boots. He knotted the laces securely together, doubled them, and tied the strings around the trunk of the bush. Then he whipped off his belt, looped it, and tied it to the doubled boot strings. As he tested its strength, he saw the dog. It had worked its way along a crack in the caprock, and was bounding down the talus slope toward him, baying again. Last night it had attacked without a sound, as attack dogs are trained to strike, and even after it had cornered him had only snarled. But he must have hurt it with a rock and it had apparently forgotten at least a little of its training. Leaphorn hoped fervently that in its hate for him it had forgotten everything. He picked up his juniper stick and trotted out across the cap toward the dog, his untied boots flapping on his ankles. Then he stopped. The worst mistake would be going too far, waiting too long, and being caught away from the edge of the cliff. He stood, the stick gripped at his side, waiting. Within seconds, the dog appeared. It was perhaps a hundred fifty yards away, running full out, looking for him.

Leaphorn cupped his hands. Dog, he shouted. Here I am.

The animal changed direction with an agility that caused Leaphorns jaw muscles to tighten. His idea wasn’t going to work. In a matter of seconds he would be trying to kill that huge animal with a stick and his bare hands. Still, the cliff edge was his best hope. The dog was racing directly toward him now, no longer barking, its teeth bared. Leaphorn waited. Eighty yards now, he guessed. Now sixty. He had a sudden vision of his laceless boots tripping him, and the nightmare thought of falling, with the dog racing down on him.

Forty yards. Thirty. Leaphorn turned and ran desperately in his flapping boots toward the cedar. He knew almost at once that he had waited too long. The dog was bigger and faster than he had realized. It must weigh nearly two hundred pounds. He could hear it at his heels. The race now seemed almost dreamlike, the looped belt hanging forever outside his reach. And then with a last leap his hand was grabbing the leather, and he felt the dogs teeth tearing at his hip, and his momentum flung him sideways around the bush, holding with every ounce of his strength to the belt, feeling the dog fly past him, its jaws still ripping at his hip-knowing with a sense of terror that their combined weight would pull his grip loose from the belt, or the nylon strings loose from the tree, and both of them would slide over the cliff and fall, the dog still tearing at him. They would fall, and fall, and fall, tumbling, waiting for the hideous split second when their bodies would strike the rocks below.

And then the teeth tore loose.

In some minuscule fraction of a second Leaphorns senses told him he was no longer connected to the dog, that his grip on the belt still held, that he would not fall to his death.

A second later he knew that his plan to send the animal skidding over the cliff had failed.

The dogs hold on Leaphorns hip had saved it. The animals back legs had slid over the edge as it had turned, but its body and its front legs were still on the cap rock and it was straining to pull itself to safety.

There was no time to think. Leaphorn flung himself at the animal, pushing desperately at its front feet. The hind paws dislodged stones as the beast kicked for lodging. It snapped viciously at Leaphorns hand. But the effort cost it an inch. Leaphorn pushed again at a forepaw. This time the dogs teeth snapped shut on his shirt sleeve. The creature was moving backward, pulling Leaphorn over the edge. Then the cloth tore loose. For a second the animal stood vertically against the cliff, supported by its straining front legs and whatever grip its hind paws had found on the stone face of the canyon wall. It was snarling, its straining efforts aimed not at saving itself but at attacking its victim. And then the hind paws must have slipped for the broad, ugly head disappeared. Leaphorn moved cautiously forward and looked over the edge. The animal was cart wheeling slowly as it fell. Far down the cliff it struck a half-dead clump of rabbit brush growing out of a crack, bounced outward, and set off a small rain of dislodged rocks. Leaphorn looked away before it struck the canyon bottom. But for luck, his body too might be suffering that impact. He pulled himself back to the cedar and inspected the damage.

His pants were bloody at the hip, where the dogs teeth had snapped through trousers, shorts, skin and muscle and had torn loose a flap of flesh. The wound burned and was bleeding copiously. It was a hell of a place to fix. No possibility of a tourniquet, and putting on a pressure bandage would require securing it around both hip and waist. He took tape from his first-aid kit and bandaged the tear as best he could. His other wounds were trivial.

A bitten place on his right wrist from which a small amount of blood was oozing, and a gash, probably caused by the dogs teeth, on the back of his left hand. He found himself wondering if the dog had been given rabies shots. The idea seemed so incongruous that he laughed aloud. Like giving shots to a werewolf, he thought.

The laugh died in his throat.

On the mesa, not far from where he had first seen the dog, sunlight flashed from something. Leaphorn crouched behind the cedar, straining his eyes. A man was standing back from the mesa rim, scanning the rocky shelf along the canyon with binoculars.

Probably Goldrims, Leaphorn thought. He would have been following his dog. He would have heard barking, and now he would be looking for the animal and for its prey.

Leaphorn contemplated hiding. With the dog out of the picture he might succeed, if he could find a place under the rim of the cap rock where he could hang on. And then he realized the man had already seen him. The binoculars were turned directly on Leaphorns cedar. There would be no hiding. He could only run, and there was no place to run. He would climb down the cleft again. That would delay the inevitable and perhaps in the cover and loose boulders of that steep slope the odds would improve for an unarmed man.

Improve, Leaphorn thought grimly, from zero to a hundred to one.

The man didn’t seem to have a rifle, but Leaphorn kept under cover as well as he could in reaching the place where the canyon wall was split. As he lowered himself over the cap rock, he saw the man emerging on the talus slope under the mesa, using the same route the dog had taken. Leaphorn had maybe a five-minute lead, and he used it recklessly taking chance after chance with his injured leg, with precarious handholds on fire-blackened brush, with footholds on stones that might not hold. He had no accurate sense of time. At any moment Goldrims might appear at the top of the slot above him and end this one-sided contest with a pistol shot. But the shot didn’t come. Leaphorn, soot-blackened, reached the sheltered place where he had survived the fire. He would give Goldrims as much excitement as he could for his money He would climb once again up behind that great slab of stone to the place where he had lain when the fire was burning.

Goldrims would have to climb after him to kill him. And while he was climbing, Goldrims might leave himself momentarily vulnerable to something thrown from above.

A small cascade of stones slid down the cleft with a clatter. Goldrims was beginning his descent. It would be slower than his own, Leaphorn knew. Goldrims had no reason to be taking chances. That left a little time. Leaphorn looked around him for rocks of the proper size. He found one, about as big as a grapefruit. The binoculars would also make a missile, and so would the flashlight. He began to climb.

It was easy enough. The face of the cliff and the inner surface of the slab were less than a yard apart. He could brace himself between them as he worked his way upward. The surfaces were relatively smooth, the stone polished by eons of rain and blowing sand since some ancient earthquake had fractured the plateau. Above him Leaphorn saw the narrow shelf where he had jammed himself and huddled away from the fire. His heart sank. It was too narrow and too cramped to offer any hope at all of defense. He couldn’t throw from there expecting to hit anything. And it offered no cover from below. Goldrims would simply shoot him and the game would be over.

Leaphorn hung motionless for a moment, looking for a way out. Could he squeeze his way to that source of air which had kept him breathing during the fire? He couldn’t. The gap narrowed quickly and then closed completely. Leaphorn frowned. Then where had that draft of fresh air originated? He could feel it now, moving faintly against his face. But not from ahead. It came from beneath him.

Leaphorn moved downward, crabwise, as rapidly as he could shift his elbows and knees.

It was cooler here, and there was dampness in the air. His boots touched broken rocks.

He was at the bottom of the split. Or almost at the bottom. Here the stones were whitish, eaten with erosion. They were limestone, and seeping water had dissolved away the calcite. Below Leaphorns feet the split sloped away into darkness. A hole. He kicked a rock loose and listened to it bouncing downward. From above and behind him came the sound of other rocks falling. Goldrims had noticed the crack behind the slab and was following him. Without a backward glance, Leaphorn scrambled downward into the narrow darkness.

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T

he watch hands and numerals were suspended, luminous yellow against the velvet blackness. It was 11:03 A.M. Almost fourteen hours since the dog had first attacked him on the canyon floor, more than twenty-four hours since he had eaten, and two hours since the thundering fall of the boulders Goldrims had dislodged to block his exit. Resting, Leaphorn had used those two hours to assess his situation and work on a plan. He wasn’t happy with either. He was caught in a cave. Two quick inspections with his flashlight told him that the cave was extensive, that it sloped sharply downward, and that like most large caves-it had been leached out of a limestone deposit by ground water. Leaphorn understood the process. Rain water draining through soil containing decaying vegetation became acidic. The acid quickly ate away the calcite in limestone, dissolving the stone and forming caverns. Here when the canyon formed it had drained away the water, and checked the process. Then an earth tremor had cracked open an entrance to the cave.

Since air flowed through it, there must be another entrance. Leaphorn could feel the movement now: a cool current past his face. His plan was simple-he would try to find another exit. If he couldn’t, he would return here and try to dig his way out. That would involve dislodging the boulders that Gold-rims had rolled into the hole, causing them to tumble downward. Doing that without being crushed would be tricky. Doing it without noise would be impossible, and Goldrims would probably be waiting.

Leaphorn flicked on the flashlight again and began edging downward. As he did, a blast of air struck him, and with the concussion, a deafening explosion of sound. It knocked him from his feet and sent him tumbling down the limestone slope, engulfed in a Niagara of noise. He lay on the cool stone, his ears assaulted with slamming echoes and the sound of falling rock. What the hell had happened? His nostrils told him in a second as the stench of burned dynamite reached them. The flashlight had been knocked from his hand, but it was still burning just below him. He retrieved it and aimed its beam upward. The air above was a fog of limestone dust and blue smoke. Goldrims had dropped dynamite into the cave entrance to kill the policeman with concussion, or crush him, or seal him in.

There’d be damn little hope now of getting out the way he’d come in. His hope, if there was hope, lay in finding the source of the air which had moved upward through this cavity.

Leaphorn moved cautiously downward, his ears still ringing with the aftereffects of the blast. At least there was no worry now of Goldrims or Tull following him. He was, from their point of view, dead or neutralized. The thought was small consolation, because Leaphorns common sense told him such a theory was probably accurate.

The cavity sloped at about sixty degrees, angling toward the face of the canyon cliff. As he lowered himself deeper into it, it widened. At places now the space overhead rose at least a hundred feet. The luminous dial of his wrist watch read a little after three when he first detected reflected light. It originated from a side cavern which led upward and to his right. Leaphorn climbed up it far enough to conclude that the light leaked in from some sort of split in the canyon cliff. The approach to it was too narrow for anything larger than a snake to navigate Leaphorn let his head slump against the stone and stared longingly toward the unattainable light. He felt no panic-only a sense of helpless defeat. He would rest for a while and then he would begin the long, weary climb back up to the entrance Goldrims had dynamited. There’d be almost no chance he could dig his way out. The blast must have dislodged tens of tons of stone. But it was the only possibility. He backed out of the crack into the cavern itself, and sat thinking. The silence was complete. He could hear his heart beating and the breath moving past his lips. The air was cool. It pressed against his left cheek, smelling fresh and clean. It should smell of burned dynamite Leaphorn thought. Why doesn’t it? It doesn’t because at this time of day, air would be moving upward through the cave, pushing the fumes out. The air was still moving. Did that mean that the exit hadn’t been entirely sealed by the blast? Leaphorn felt a stirring of hope. But no. The air was moving in the wrong direction. It was moving past his face into the crack toward the light source. Leaphorn thought about what that implied, and felt another stirring of hope. There must be another source of air, deeper in the cavern, Perhaps this eroded cavity intersected with the cliff wall somewhere below.

At 6:19 P.M., Leaphorn reached a bottom. He squatted, savoring the unaccustomed feel of level flatness under his boot soles. The floor here had been formed by sediment. It was calcite dissolved out of the limestone walls, but over the calcite there was a thin layer of gritty sand. Leaphorn examined it with the flashlight. It seemed to be the same sort of sand one would find at the canyon bottom outside a mixture of fine particles of granite, silica, limestone and sandstone. He flashed the light around. This flat surface seemed to extend from the declivity he had been descending along the length of this long, narrow compartment. The sand must have washed in from below or blown in on the wind. Either way, he should be able to see daylight. He turned off the flashlight and stood, seeing nothing but blackness. But there was still the moving air the faint feeling of pressure against his face which seemed characteristic of this cave. He moved into the air movement now, as he had ever since he had entered the cave. For the first time, the going was relatively easy a matter of walking instead of climbing. He saw that originally the cave had continued its downward plunge here-but an invasion of water had filled it with a sedimentary floor. The floor was level, but the ceiling sloped toward his head. He had to stoop now, to pass a cluster of stalactites. Beyond them his flashlight beam prodded to the inevitable point of intersection where slanted ceiling met level floor.

Leaphorn squatted under the lowering roof, moving forward. He advanced on hands and knees. Finally, he crawled. The angle between floor and ceiling narrowed everywhere to nothing. Leaphorn let his forehead rest against the calcite, fighting off the first nudgings of panic. How much longer would the flashlight last? It was a subject he hadn’t allowed himself to consider. He moved the tip of his nose through the film of gritty dust and was reassured. His reason told him this sandy stuff must have been carried in from the outside-from the world of light. But here in this cul-de-sac there was no air movement. He began crawling backward. He would find the moving air again and try to follow it.

But the air current was dying. At first Leaphorn thought he had simply been unable to find the area through which it moved. And then he realized that it must be nearing that time of day when this earthly breathing stops the moment near the mar-gin of daylight and dark when the heating/cooling process briefly reaches balance, when warm air no longer presses upward and cool air is not yet heavy enough to sink. Even in this slanting cavern, where narrowness of passageway multiplied the effect, there would be two periods, morning and evening when the draft would be dead.

Leaphorn collected a pinch of the fine-grained sand between thumb and forefinger and sifted it out into the beam of his flashlight. It fell almost perpendicularly. Almost but not quite. Leaphorn moved toward the source of air, repeating the process. And the fifth time he bent to replenish his supply of dust, he saw the footprint of the dog.

He squatted, looking at the print and digesting what it meant. It meant, first, that he was not doomed to die entombed in this cave. The dog had found a way in. Leaphorn could find a way out. It meant, second, that the cavity Leaphorn had been following down from high up the cliff must be connected to a cavern that opened on the canyon bottom. As the thought came, Leaphorn flicked off the flashlight. If the dog had been in this cave, it was probably the hiding place of Goldrims.

Even though he now used the flashlight only cautiously, following the dogs tracks was relatively easy. The animal had roamed through a labyrinth of rooms and corridors, but had quickly exhausted its curiosity.

At about 8 P.M. Leaphorn detected a dim reflection of light. Exulting in the sight, he moved toward it slowly, stopping often to listen. He had a single advantage and he intended to guard it: Goldrims and Tull believed he was dead and out of the game. As long as they didn’t know he was inside their sanctuary, he had surprise on his side. He became aware of sounds now. First there was a vague purring, which began suddenly and stopped just as abruptly about five minutes later. It sounded like a small, well-muffled internal-combustion engine. A little later Leaphorn heard a metallic clatter, and after that, when he had edged perhaps a hundred yards toward the source of light, a thumping noise. The light was general now. Still faint but enough so that Leaphorn his pupils totally dilated by hours of absolute darkness could forgo the flashlight entirely. He moved past one of the seemingly endless screens of stalagmites into another of the series of auditorium-sized cavities which water seepage had produced at this level. Just around the screen, Leaphorn stopped. The light here reflected and shimmered from the irregular ceiling far overhead. At the end of this room, he could see water. He edged toward it. An underground pool. Its surface was about three feet lower than the old calcite deposit which formed the cavern floor. He knelt beside it and dipped in a finger. It was cool, but not cold.

He tasted it. Fresh, with none of the alkaline flavor he had expected. He looked down its surface, toward the source of light. And then he realized that this water must be part of Lake Powell backing into the cave as the lake surface rose with spring runoff and draining out as the level fell with autumn and winter. He drank thirstily.

The dog tracks led Leaphorn away from the water into the next room. At its far end, Leaphorn saw, it, too, opened onto the lake surface. The light here was still indirect seemingly reflecting out of the water but it was brighter. There were sounds, blurred by echoes. Voices. Whose? Goldrims and Tull? Father Goldrims and Theodora Adams? And how had a doctors daughter and a Franciscan priest become involved in this violent affair?

He thought of the face of Father Tso as it had looked magnified through binoculars-the eyes intent on the elevated host, the expression rapt. And the face in the reflected glow of the flashlight at the canyon bottom the man in the gold-rimmed glasses calmly discussing with Tull how to burn Leaphorn to death. Had his eyes tricked him in the flickering light?

Could they be the same man?

The hunger cramps which had bothered him earlier were gone now. He hadn’t eaten for thirty-three hours and his digestive system seemed to have adjusted to the oddity. He felt only a sort of lethargic weakness the product, he guessed, of low blood sugar. An intermittent throbbing had joined the ache in his hip-probably the symptom of an infection beginning in the dog bite. That was something he could think about much later. Now the problem was to find a way out of here.

As he thought that, a beam of yellow light flashed across his face.

Before Leaphorn could react, the light was gone. He stood looking frantically for a place to hide. And then he realized that whoever was behind the light apparently hadn’t noticed him. He could see the light only indirectly now, reflecting off the limestone far down the cavern. It swung and bobbed with the movement of the person who carried it. Leaphorn moved toward it as swiftly as he could without risking noise.

The flat calcite floor deposit quickly gave way to rougher going a mixture of stalagmite deposits jutting upward and outcrops of some sort of darker non-limestone extrusions which had resisted the dissolving water. The light disappeared, then its reflection appeared again between a high ridge of lime deposit and the cavern ceiling. Leaphorn climbed the ridge gingerly. He peered over the top. Below him, a thin man wearing a blue shirt and a red sweatband around his forehead was squatting beside a pile of cartons, gathering an armload of boxes and cans. The man rose and turned. He clutched his burden to his chest with his right arm, awkwardly retrieved an electric lantern with his left, and walked quickly from Leaphorns view the same way he had come. The bobbing light of his lantern faded away. Leaphorn lay a moment, listening. Then he slid over the limestone barrier and climbed quietly down to the boxes.

They contained groceries canned vegetables, canned meats, cartons of crackers and cookies, pork and beans, canned peaches. Sufficient, Leaphorn guessed, to feed a family for a month. He made a quick estimate of the missing cans and boxes. About enough gone to amount to thirty or forty man-days of eating. Either this cave had been occupied by one person a month or more, or by several persons for a shorter period. Near the cache of groceries was a row of five-gallon gasoline cans. Eight of them. Leaphorn checked. Five were full of gasoline and three were empty. Beyond them was a wooden crate. The word explosives was stenciled across the loosened lid. Leaphorn lifted it and looked inside. Dynamite sticks, neatly packed. Six of the twenty-four sticks were missing.

He replaced the lid. Beside the dynamite case was a padlocked metal toolbox and two cardboard cartons. The smaller one contained a roll of blue insulated wire. The larger one originally had held a pair of Justin boots. Now it held what looked like the works of a large clock a timing device of some sort. Leaphorn put it back and rearranged the paper padding as he had found it. He squatted on his heels. What might he do with dynamite and a timing device? He could think of absolutely nothing useful, beyond committing suicide. The detonators seemed to be kept somewhere else a healthy habit developed by those who worked with explosives. Without the blasting caps the stuff could be fired by impact but it would take a heavy blow. He left the dynamite and selected a box of crackers and an assortment of canned meats and vegetables from boxes where they seemed least likely to be missed. Then he hurried back into the darkness. He would hide, eat, and wait.

With food and water, time was no longer an enemy. He would wait for night, when darkness would spread from the interior of the cave to its mouth. Then he could learn more about what lay between him and the exit.

Even during the long days of August, darkness came relatively early at the bottom of a canyon. By 9 P.M. it was dark enough. His boot soles and heels were rubber and relatively noiseless, but he cut the sleeves from his shirt and wrapped the boots carefully to further muffle the sound of his footsteps. Then he began his careful prowling. A little before 11 P.M. he had done as much exploring as caution permitted. He had learned that his escape would certainly involve getting wet, and would probably involve getting shot.

He had found the cave mouth by edging his way down the waterline, wading at times where the limestone formations forced him into the water. Just around one such outcropping, he had seen a wide arch of opalescent light. The night outside, dark as it was, was immensely brighter than the eyeless blackness of the cave. The cave mouth showed as an irregular, flattened arch of light. This bright slope was bisected by a horizontal line. Leaphorn studied this optical phenomenon a moment before he understood its cause. Most of the mouth of the cave was submerged in the lake. Only a few feet at the top were open to the air. Leaving the cave would involve swimming simple enough. It would also involve swimming past two men. A butane lantern on a shelf of stone to the left of the cave entrance illuminated the men. One was Tull. In the dim light, he was sprawled against a bedroll, reading a magazine. The other man had his back to Leaphorn. He was kneeling, working intently at something. Leaphorn extracted his binoculars. Through them he saw the man was working on what seemed to be a radio transceiver, apparently adjusting something. His shoulders were hunched and his face hidden, but the form and clothing were familiar. Goldrims. Leaphorn stared at the man, pulled optically almost into touching distance by the lenses. Was it the priest? He felt his stomach tighten. Fear, or anger, or both. The man had tried to kill him three times. He stared at the mans back, watching his shoulders move as he worked. Then he shifted the binoculars to Tull, seeing the undamaged side of his face in profile. From this angle the deformity was not apparent. The face, softly lit by the yellow flare of the lantern, was gentle, engrossed in whatever he was reading. The lips suddenly turned up in a smile, and the face turned toward Father Goldrims and mouthed something. Leaphorn had seen the ruined face before in the flickering firelight. Now he saw it more clearly the crushed cheekbone, the mouth pulled forever awry by the improperly healed jawbone, the misshapen eye socket. It was the sort of face that made those who saw it flinch.

Suddenly Tull’s lips stopped moving. He swung his head slightly to the left, frowning, listening. Then Leaphorn heard the sound that had attracted Tull’s attention. It was faint and made incoherent by echoes, but it was a human sound. Tull said something to Goldrims, his face angry. Goldrims glanced toward the source of the sound, his face in profile now to Leaphorns binoculars. He shook his head, said something, and went back to work. Leaphorn lowered the binoculars and concentrated on listening. The sound was high-pitched, shrill and excited. A female voice. Now he knew in what direction he would find Theodora Adams.

» 17 «

Leaphorn moved carefully back into the labyrinth, circling to his right beyond the cache of supplies into another arm of the cavern. The calcite floors here were at several levels dropping abruptly as much as four or five feet from one flat plane to another suggesting that the cavern had flooded, drained and re-flooded repeatedly down through geological time. The darkness was virtually total again and Leaphorn felt his way cautiously, not risking the flashlight, less fearful of a fall than of giving away his only advantage. The distant sound of the voices pulled him on. There was a hint of light from ahead, elusive as the sound, which echoed and reflected, seeming no closer. Leaphorn stopped, as he had a dozen times, trying to locate the source exactly. As he stood, breath held, ears straining, he heard another sound.

It was a rubbing, scraping sound, coming from his right. At first it defied identification. He stared into the blackness. The sound came, and came again, and came again rhythmically. It became louder, and clearer, and Leaphorn began to distinguish a pattern to it a second of silence before the repetition. It was something alive dragging itself directly toward him. Leaphorn had a sudden hideous intuition. The dog had tumbled down the cliff.

But he hadn’t seen it hit the bottom. It was alive, crippled, dragging itself inexorably after Leaphorns scent. For a second, reason reasserted itself in Leaphorns logical mind. The dog couldn’t have fallen three hundred feet down the face of that cliff and survived. But then the sound came again, closer now, only a few yards away from his feet, and Leaphorn was again in a nightmare world in which men became witches, and turned themselves into wolves; in which wolves didn’t fall, but flew. He pointed the flashlight at the sound, like a gun, and pushed the button.

There was, for a moment, nothing but a blaze of blinding light. Then Leaphorns dilated pupils adjusted and the shape illuminated in the flashlight beam became Father Benjamin Tso. The priests eyes were squeezed shut against the light, his face jerked away from the beam. He was sitting on the calcite floor, his feet stretched in front of him, his arms behind him. His ankles were fastened with what appeared to be a strip of nylon.

Now Tso squinted up into the flashlight beam.

All right, he said. If you’ll untie my ankles, Ill walk back.

Leaphorn said nothing.

No harm trying, the priest said. He laughed. Maybe I could have got away.

Who in the hell are you? Leaphorn asked. He could hardly get the words out.

The priest frowned into the light, his face puzzled. What do you mean? he asked. Then he frowned again, trying to see Leaphorns face through the flashlight beam. I’m Benjamin Tso, he said. Father Benjamin Tso. He paused. But aren’t you . . . ?

I’m Leaphorn. The Navajo cop.

Thank God, Father Tso said. Thank God for that. He swung his head to the side. The others are back there. Theyre all right. How did you . . . ?

Keep your voice down, Leaphorn said. He snapped off the light and listened. In the cave now there was only a heavy, ear-ringing total silence.

Can you untie my hands? Father Tso whispered. They’ve been numb for a long time.

Leaphorn switched on the flash again, holding his hand over the lens to release only the dimmest illumination. He studied the priests face. It was a lot like the face of the man he had seen with Tull and the dog, the face of the man who had tried to burn him to death in the canyon.

Father Benjamin Tso glanced up at Leaphorn, and then away. Even in the dim light Leaphorn could see the face change. It became tired and older.

I guess you’ve met my brother, he said.

Is that it? Leaphorn asked. Yes, it must be. He looks something like you.

A year older, Father Tso said. We weren’t raised together. He glanced up at Leaphorn.

He’s in the Buffalo Society. My returning didn’t help his plans.

But what made you . . . how did you get here? Leaphorn asked. I mean, to your grandfathers hogan?

It was a long trip. I flew back from Rome, and then to Phoenix. And then I took a bus to Flagstaff and then to Kayenta, and then I caught a ride.

And where’s the Adams girl?

He came to the hogan and got us, Tso said. My brother and that dog he has. Father Tso stopped. That dog. He’s around here and hell find us. Are there other police with you?

Have you arrested them?

The dogs dead. Just tell me what happened, Leaphorn said.

My brother came to the hogan and brought us to this cave, Father Tso said. He said wed have to stay until some sort of operation was over. Then later . . . He shrugged and looked apologetic. I don’t know how much later. Its hard to keep track of time in here and I cant see my wrist watch. Anyway, later, my brother and a man called Tull and three other men brought a bunch of Boy Scouts and put them in with us. I don’t understand it. What do you know about it?

Just what I heard on the radio, Leaphorn said. He knelt behind Tso and examined the bindings on his wrists. Keep talking, Leaphorn said. And keep it at a whisper. He fished out his pocket knife and sawed through the strips, a type of disposable handcuff developed for use by police in making mass arrests. The BIA police had bought some during the early stages of the American Indian Movement troubles, but they’d been junked because if the subject struggled, they tightened and cut off circulation. Tsos hands were ice cold and bloodless. It would be a while before he could use them.

I just know what I heard, too, Father Tso was saying. And what the Scout leader told us. I guess were involved in some sort of symbolic kidnapping.

Leaphorn had the strips cut from Tsos ankles now. Tso tried to massage them, but his numb hands dangled almost uselessly from his wrists.

It takes a while for the circulation to come back, Leaphorn said. When it does, it hurts.

Can you tell me more?

Tso began rubbing his hands briskly against his chest. Every couple of hours or so Tull or my brother comes back and they have two questions they ask the Scout leader or one of the boys. Its to prove everyone is still alive or something. It seems they told the police they have to stay completely out of this part of the reservation. I think the deal is if they see any police they say they’ll kill the hostages. Otherwise the police get to broadcast questions every couple of hours, and he

Questions? What sort of questions?

Oh, one was where did the Scout leader meet his wife. And one was why he was late for a trip, and where was the telephone in his home. Trivial stuff that no one else could know.

Father Tso grimaced suddenly and inspected his hands. I see what you mean about hurting.

Keep rubbing them. And keep talking. Do you know the timetable? Leaphorn asked. Did you hear anything about that?

They told the Scouts they’d probably be here about two or three days. Maybe less. Until they get the ransom.

Do you know how many are involved? I’ve seen three in the cave. Are there more than that?

I’ve seen at least five, Father Tso said. When my brother brought us back, first there was just a young man here they call Jackie. Just my brother and Jackie. Then when they brought the Boy Scouts there were three more of them. One with an awfully disfigured face, called Tull. He’s still here, I think. But I haven’t seen the other two again.

This Jackie. How was he dressed? Leaphorn asked.

Jeans, Father Tso said. Denim shirt. Red sweatband around his forehead.

Yes, I’ve seen him, Leaphorn said. Where are the other hostages? And how’d you get away?

They’ve got a sort of cage welded together out of reinforcing rods or something, Tso said.

Set back in a part of the cave way back there. That’s where they put Theodora and me at first, and then they brought the Boy Scouts in. Then a couple of hours ago they took me out and moved me into another part of the cave. Tso pointed behind him. A sort of big room back in that direction, and they put these things on my wrists and ankles and they sort of anchored me to a stalagmite. Tso laughed. Tied a rope around How’d you get loose?

Well, they warned me that if I moved around too much with these nylon things on they’d tighten up and cut off my circulation, but I found that if you didn’t mind a little of that, you could work the strip around so that the knot was where you could get at it.

Leaphorn remembered trying on the nylon cuffs when the department was considering them, and how quickly pulling against them caused them to cut into your wrists. He glanced at Tso, re-measuring him.

The people who invented those things counted on people not wanting to hurt themselves, Leaphorn said.

I guess so, Father Tso said. He was massaging his ankles now. Anyway, these calcite deposits are too soft to cut anything. I thought maybe I could find some sort of outcropping granite or something where I could cut the nylon off.

Is the feeling coming back? Leaphorn asked. Good. I don’t think we want to waste any time if we can help it. I don’t have a gun. He helped Tso to his feet and supported him.

When they come to the cage to get the questions answered, who comes? Just one of them?

The last time it was just the one with the red headband. The one they called Jackie.

You okay now? Ready to move?

Father Tso took a step, and then a smaller one, and sucked in his breath sharply. Just give me a second to get used to it. The breath hissed through gritted teeth. What are we going to do? he whispered.

Were going to be there when they come back to the cage. If you can find a place for me to hide. If two come, we wont try anything right now. But if just one of them comes, then you step out and confront him. Make as much noise as you can to cover me coming, and Ill jump him.

As I remember it, there’s not much to hide behind, Tso said doubtfully. Not close anyway.

They moved slowly through the dark, the priest limping gingerly, Leaphorn supporting part of his weight.

There’s one other thing, Tso said. I don’t think this Tull is sane. He thinks he dies and comes back alive again.

I’ve heard about Tull, Leaphorn said.

And my brother, Tso said. I guess you’d have to say he’s sort of crazy, too.

Leaphorn said nothing. They moved silently toward the light, feeling their way. From ahead, suddenly, there came the sound of a woman’s voice distant, and as yet undecipherable.

This is terrible for Theodora, Father Tso said. Terrible.

Yes, Leaphorn said. He was remembering Captain Largos instructions. He flicked the flash on getting direction and quickly off.

My brother, Tso said. He stayed with my father, and my father was a drunk. Tsos whisper was barely audible. I didn’t ever live with them. All I know is what I’ve heard, but I heard it was bad. My father died of a beating in Gallup. The whisper stopped and Leaphorn began thinking of other things, of what his tactics would have to be.

My brother was about fourteen when it happened, Father Tso said. I heard my brother was there when they beat him, and that it was the police that did it.

Maybe, Leaphorn said. There’re some bad cops. He flicked the light on again, and off.

That’s not what I’m talking about, Father Tso said. I’m telling you because I don’t think there’ll be any hostages released. He paused. They’ve gone too far for that, the voice whispered. Theyre not sane. None of them. Poor Theodora.

They could hear the voice of Theodora Adams again, a matter more of tones echoing than of words. Leaphorn was suddenly aware that he was exhausted. His hip throbbed steadily now, his burn stung, his cut hand hurt. He felt sick and frightened and humiliated.

And all this merged into anger.

God damn it, he said. You say you’re a priest? What were you doing with a woman anyway?

Tso limped along silently. Leaphorn instantly regretted the question.

There are good priests and bad ones, Tso said. You get into it because you tell yourself somebody needs help . . .

Look, Leaphorn said. Its none of my business. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have No, Father Tso said. That’s fair enough. First you kid yourself somebody needs you which is easy to kid yourself about, because that’s why you thought you had the vocation to start with. That’s what the fathers tell you at St. Anthony’s Mission, you know: Somebody needs you. And then its all reversed: a woman comes along who needs help. And then she’s an antidote for loneliness. And then she’s most of everything you’re giving up. And what if you’re wrong? What if there’s no God? If there’s not, you’re letting your life tick away for nothing. It gets complicated. So you get your faith back. . . . He stopped, glanced at Leaphorn in the brief glow of the flash. You do get it if you want it, you know. And so you try to get out of it. You run away. Father Tso stopped. Then he began again. But by then, she really does need you. So what are you running away from? Even whispered, the question was angry.

So that’s why you came trying to get away from her? Leaphorn asked.

I don’t know, Father Tso said. The old man asked me to come. But mostly I was running, I guess.

And you got tangled with your brother?

Were the Hero Twins. Father Tso made a sound a little like laughing. Maybe were both saving the People from the Monsters. Different approaches, but about equal success.

Now the voice of Theodora Adams was close enough so that they could understand an occasional word. The cavern narrowed again, and Leaphorn stood against the wall, one hand holding the priests elbow, and stared toward reflected light. The light was harsh and its source was low probably a lantern of some sort placed on the calcite floor. Here a hodgepodge of stalagmites rose in crooked lines from the level floor and curtains of stalactites hung down toward them. The light cast them in relief black against the dim yellow.

The cage is just back around that corner, Tso whispered. That lights from a butane lamp sitting outside.

Does the guard have to come past this way?

I don’t know, Tso said. Its confusing in here.

Lets get closer, then, Leaphorn said softly. But keep it absolutely quiet. He might be there already.

They edged through the darkness, keeping in the cover of a wall of stalagmites. Leaphorn could see part of the cage now, and the butane lantern, and the head and shoulders of Theodora Adams sitting in its corner. Close enough, he thought. Somewhere near here he would stage his ambush.

I wonder why they took me out of there, Father Tso whispered.

Leaphorn didn’t answer. He was thinking that maybe with Father Tso subtracted, the cage held the symbolic number eleven children and three adults. Father Tso would have spoiled the symmetry of revenge. But there must be more reason than that.

In the darkness, time seemed to take on another dimension. After three exhausting days and nights virtually without sleep, Leaphorn was finding it took much of his concentration simply to stay awake. He shifted, moving his weight from his left side to his right. In this new position, he could see most of Theodora Adams. The lantern light gave her face a sculptured effect and left her eye sockets dark. He could see two other hostages of the Buffalo Society. A man who must be one of the Scout leaders lay on his side, his head cushioned on his folded coat, apparently asleep. He was a small man, perhaps forty-five years old, with dark hair and a delicate doll-like face. There was a dark smudge on his forehead, rubbed into a brown streak across his cheek. Dried blood from a head cut, Leaphorn guessed. The mans hands lay relaxed and limp against the floor. The other person was a boy, perhaps thirteen, who slept fitfully. Theodora Adams spoke to someone out of Leaphorns vision.

Is he feeling any better?

And a precise, boyish voice said, I think he’s almost asleep.

After that, no one said anything. Leaphorn longed for a conversation to overhear. For anything to help him fight off the dizzying assault of sleep. He forced his mind to consider the furious activity this kidnapping must be creating. The rescue of this many children would have total, absolute priority. Every man, every resource, would be made available for finding them. The reservation would be a swarm with FBI agents, and every variety of state, federal, military and Indian cop. Leaphorn caught himself slipping into a dream of the bedlam that must be going on now at Window Rock, and shook his head furiously. He couldn’t allow himself to sleep. He forced his mind to retrace what must have been the sequence of this affair. Why this cave was so important was clear to him now. On the surface of the earth, there was no way an operation like this could remain undetected. But this cave was not only a hiding hole under the earth; it was one whose existence was hidden behind a century of time and the promises made to a holy mans ghost. Old Man Tso must have learned that the sacred cave was being used and desecrated when he came to take care of the medicine bundles left by Standing Medicine. That seemed now to be what was implied in the story Tso had told Listening Woman. And the Buffalo Society either knew he had found them, or had learned he used the cave. And that meant he could not be left alive. A dream of the murder of Hosteen Tso began merging with reality in Leaphorns mind. He ground his chin deliberately against the stone, driving away sleep with pain.

And the police would never find this cave. They would ask the People. The People would know nothing. The cave would have been entered only by water on which no tracks can be followed. From outside, the cave mouth would seem only one of a hundred thousand dark cliff overhangs into which the water lapped. They would ask Old Man McGinnis, who usually knew everything, and McGinnis would know nothing. Leaphorn fought back sleep by diverting his thoughts into another channel. The same fade-away tactics employed in the Santa Fe robbery were probably being used here. Those who seized and delivered the hostages would have run for cover. They would have gone safely away long before the crime was discovered. Only enough men would have been left here to handle the hostages and collect the ransom. Probably only three men. But how would they get away?

Everyone had escaped, except three. Tull and Jackie and Goldrims. They would have set up a way to relay and rebroadcast the radio message that kept the police away. Easy enough to rig, Leaphorn guessed. It wouldn’t take much if the transmissions were kept brief to confuse radio directional finders. But how did the Society plan to extricate the final three when the ransom arrived? How could they be given time to escape? No one except the hostages would have seen them. If the hostages were killed, there would be no witnesses. Still, Goldrims would need running time an hour or two to get far enough away from here to become just another Navajo. How could he provide himself with that time?

Leaphorn thought of the dynamite, and the timing device, and of John Tull, who believed himself to be immortal.

Leaphorn caught himself dozing again and shook his head angrily. If he hoped to leave this cave alive, he must stay awake until Goldrims, or Tull, or Jackie came alone to check on the hostages, or ask the ritual questions of one of the Scouts. He must be awake and alert for an opportunity at ambush, at overpowering the guard, at getting a gun and changing the odds. To accomplish this he had to stay awake. To go to sleep would be to wake up dead. Thinking that, Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn fell asleep.

Leaphorns dream had nothing at all to do with the cave, or kidnapping, or Goldrims, or Hosteen Tso. It was involved with winter and with punishment, and was motivated by the cold of the stone beneath his side and the pain in his hip. Despite his exhaustion, this discomfort kept dragging him back toward consciousness, and finally to a voice which was saying:

All right. Wake him up.

For a moment the words were nothing but an incomprehensible part of a chaotic dream.

And then Leaphorn was awake.

Lets not waste any time, the voice was saying, and it was the voice of Goldrims. I need the one named Symons. A panicky second passed before Leaphorn realized that Goldrims was standing by the cage door and the words were not directed at him.

You’re Symons? Goldrims asked. The voice was loud and the words echoed through the cavern. Wake up. I need to know your birth date and what your wife gave you for your last birthday.

Leaphorn could hear Symons's voice, but not his answer.

May third and what? May third and a sweater. Okay.

Are you going to let us go? It was Theodora Adams’s voice, but she had moved out of the corner now and out of Leaphorns vision.

Sure, Goldrims said. When we get what were asking, you’re free as a bird. The voice sounded amused.

What have you done with Ben? she asked.

Goldrims said nothing. Leaphorn could see his back and his right profile, silhouetted against the reflected lantern light. Far behind him, at the edge of the darkness, John Tull stood. The lantern light glistened on the shotgun Tull held casually by his side. The shadow converted his ruined face into a gargoyle shape. But Leaphorn could see Tull was grinning. He could also see there was no chance for an ambush.

What have I done with Ben? Goldrims asked. He moved abruptly to the cages gate, and there was the click of the padlock opening. Goldrims disappeared inside. What have I done with Ben? he asked again. The voice was fierce now and there was the sudden violent sound of a blow struck. Near him in the darkness, Leaphorn heard a sharp intake of breath from where Father Tso was standing, and there was a muffled scream from the Adams woman.

You bitch, Goldrims was saying. You tell me what Whitey has done to Ben. It got him crawling on his belly to a white mans church, giving himself up to the white mans God, and then a white bitch comes along.. Goldrims's voice broke, and halted. And when it began again its words were paced, tense, controlled. I know how it works, Goldrims said.

When I heard that this thing that claims to be my brother had become a priest, I got a book and read about it. They made him lay on his face, and promise to stay away from women.

And then the first slut that comes after him, he breaks his promise.

Goldrims’s voice halted. He reappeared in Leaphorns view, opening the gate. Leaphorn could hear Theodora Adams crying, and a whimpering sound from one of the Boy Scouts.

Tull was no longer grinning. His grotesque face was somber and watchful. Goldrims closed the gate behind him.

Slut, he said. You’re the kind of woman who eats men.

And with that, Goldrims clicked the padlock shut and walked angrily across the cave floor, with Tull two steps behind him. The lantern Goldrims carried illuminated them only from the waist down four legs scissoring, out of step and out of cadence. Leaphorn told Father Tso where to wait for a second chance at an ambush two hours later. And then he followed the now distant legs through the darkness. It was like tracking a strange uncoordinated beast through the night.

» 18 «

N

o, no, Goldrims was saying. Look. It goes in like this.

They were squatted beside the radio transceiver, Tull and Goldrims, with the one they called Jackie sprawled on the bedroll, motionless.

Like this? Tull asked. He was doing something with the transmitter-changing the crystal or making some sort of antenna adjustment, Leaphorn guessed. From where he stood behind the stalagmites that formed the nearest cover, the acoustics of the cave carried the voices clearly through the stillness, but Leaphorn was too far away to hear everything. Tull said something else, unintelligible.

All right, then, Goldrims said. Run through it again. There was a pause. Right, Goldrims said. That’s right. Put the speaker of the tape recorder about three inches from the mike.

About like that.

I’ve got it, Tull said. No sweat. And right at 4 A.M. Right?

That’s right 4 A.M. for the next one. If I’m not back by then. Just a second and well get this one broadcast. He studied his watch, apparently waiting for the proper second. Then he took the microphone, flicked a series of switches. Whitey, he said. Whitey, this is Buffalo Society. We have your answers and instructions.

The radio said: Go ahead, Buffalo, ready to record.

Your answers are May the third and a sweater, Goldrims said. And now were ready to wrap this up. Here are your orders. Goldrims leaned toward the microphone and Leaphorn could hear only part of the instructions. There were references to map coordinates, a line drawn between them, one man in a helicopter, references to times, a flashed signal from the ground. Obviously instructions for the ransom drop, and like everything else about this operation, it seemed meticulously planned. No way to set a trap if the drop site wasn’t known until the copter reached it. In all, the instructions took only a minute. And then the radio was off, and Goldrims was standing, facing directly toward Leaphorn, talking to Tull, going over it again. They walked away together, away from the pool of lantern light toward the water, still talking.

Then the purring sound of a heavily muffled engine started. Not a generator, as he had thought, but almost certainly a muffled boat engine. The sound moved and faded toward the dim light of the cave mouth.

Leaphorn waited long enough to make absolutely sure that the man returning with the bobbing flashlight was John Tull. Then he moved quietly away from the stalagmites, back into the darkness. It would be at least an hour, he guessed, before the next questions were radioed in and the next answers extracted to prove the hostages still alive. Leaphorn intended to use that hour well. He had not seen the boat. He planned to make sure there was nothing else hidden in this darkness that he didn’t know about.

The dynamite was gone. Leaphorn flicked the flashlight beam quickly across the cartons of supplies to make sure he hadn’t simply forgotten where the wooden case had been.

Even as he did, logic told him the dynamite, and the small boxes containing the timer and the electrical wire, would be missing. He had expected it. It fit into the pattern Leaphorns mind was trying to make of this affair of the relationship between Tull and Goldrims and between what seemed to be too many coincidences, and too many unanswered questions. He snapped off the flashlight and stood in the darkness, concentrating on arranging what he knew of Goldrims and the Buffalo Society, and of what was happening here, into some order. He tried to project, and understand, Goldrims’s intentions. The man was extremely smart. And he was Navajo. He could easily vanish in the immense empty canyon country around Short Mountain, no matter how many people were hunting him. If he had another well-stocked hideaway like this, he could stay holed up for months. But finally he would run out of time. He would be the country’s most wanted man. There seemed to be no real possibility of escape for Goldrims. That seemed out of character. A fatal loose end. Goldrims would leave no loose ends, Leaphorn thought. There must be something Leaphorn was overlooking.

The dynamite and the timer must have something to do with it. But Leaphorn couldn’t see how blowing up the cave would solve Goldrims’s problem. He glanced at his watch. In about forty-five minutes, the next set of questions would be broadcast and brought to the Boy Scouts for the time-buying answers. When that time came, Leaphorn had to be in position to jump whoever came with the tape recorder. In the meantime, he had to find the dynamite.

Leaphorn did find some of the dynamite. But first he discovered what had to be Hosteen Tsos tracks, undisturbed in the quiet dust for months. They were moccasin prints scuffed across the white floor. Mixed with them were boot tracks which Leaphorn had long since identified as Goldrims’s. They led into what seemed to be a dead-end cavern. But the cavern turned, and dropped, and widened into a room with a ceiling which soared upward into a ragged hanging curtain of stalactites. Leaphorn examined it quickly with his flashlight. In several places the calcite surface was piled deep with ashes of old fires.

Leaphorn took two steps toward the old hearths and stopped abruptly. The floor here was patterned with sand paintings. At least thirty of them, each a geometric pattern of the colors and shapes of the Holy People of the Navajos. Leaphorn studied them recognizing Corn Beetle, the Sacred Fly, Talking God, and Black God, Coyote and others. He could read some of the stories told in these pictures-formed-of-colored-sand. One of them he recognized as part of the Sun Father Chant, and another seemed to be a piece of the Mountain Way. Leaphorn came from a family rich in ceremonial people. Two of his uncles were singers, and a grandfather; a nephew was learning a curing ritual, and his maternal grandmother had been a Hand-Trembler famous in the Toadlena-Beautiful Mountain country. But some of these dry paintings were totally unfamiliar to him. These must be the great heritage Standing Medicine had left for the People the Way to start the world again.

Leaphorn stood staring at them, and then past them at the black metal case that sat on the cave floor beyond them. His flashlight beam glittered from the glass face of dials and from shiny metal knobs. Leaphorn squatted beside it. A trademark on its side read hall crafters. It was another radio transmitter. Wires ran from it, disappearing into the darkness. Connecting to an antenna, Leaphorn guessed. Taped securely to its top was a battery-powered tape recorder, and wired to both tape recorder and radio was an enameled metal box. Leaphorn was conscious now of a new sound, a sort of electric whirring which came from the box another timer. The dial on its top showed its pointer had moved past seven of the fifty markings on its face. There was no way of telling whether each mark represented a minute or an hour. It was obviously adjustable. Behind the radio a paper sack sat on the floor also linked to terminals on the timer box. Leaphorn opened the sack gingerly. In it were two dynamite sticks, held together around a blasting cap with black friction tape. Leaphorn rocked back on his heels, frowning. Why dynamite a radio?

He studied the timer again. It seemed to be custom-made. Sequential, he guessed. First it would turn on the radio, and then the tape recorder, and when the recording was broadcast, it would detonate the dynamite.

Leaphorn extracted his pocket knife and carefully removed the screws that attached the dynamite wires to the timer. Then he cut the tape recorder free, sat on the floor and pushed the play button.

You were warned. But our people

The words boomed out into the cave. Leaphorn stabbed the off button down. The voice was that of Goldrims. But he couldn’t risk playing it now. Sound carried too well in this cavern. He shoved the recorder under his shirt. He would play the tape later.

As it happened, Leaphorn had cut it close. He found Father Benjamin Tso waiting where he had left him, hidden among a cluster of stalagmites close to the cage door. He told the priest what he had learned, of Goldrims’s leaving to pick up the ransom, and of the radio and the time bomb in the cave room where Father Tso had been left.

I saw the radio, Father Tso said. I didn’t know what was in the sack. He paused. But why would he want to blow me up? The voice was incredulous. Leaphorn didn’t attempt an answer. Far back in the darkness a tiny dot of light had appeared, bobbing with the walk of whoever carried it. Leaphorn prayed it was Jackie, and only Jackie. He motioned Father Tso back out of sight and climbed quickly onto a calcite shelf, from which he could watch and launch his ambush. He was still trying to control his breathing when the yellow light of a battery lantern joined the glow of the butane light at the cage.

Time to talk again. The voice was Jackie’s. Got questions for two of these boys. He hooked his lantern on his belt, shifted the shotgun he was carrying to his left hand and fished a piece of paper from his shirt pocket.

Leaphorn moved swiftly. He had the walkie-talkie out of its case, holding it like a club as he came around the wall of stalagmites. Then he hesitated. Once he jumped down to the lower calcite floor, there was no cover. For thirty yards he would be in the open and clearly visible. It was much too far. Jackie would have him. He could spin around and shoot Leaphorn dead.

But Father Tso was there, walking toward Jackie.

Hey, Jackie said. He swung the shotgun toward Tso. Hey, how’d you get loose?

Put down the gun! Father Tso shouted it, and the cavern echo-boomed: Gun . . . gun . . .

gun . . . gun. He walked toward Jackie. Put it down.

Hold it, Jackie said. Hold it or Ill kill you. He took a step backward. Come on, he shouted.

Jesus, you’re as crazy as Tull.

I’m as immortal as Tull, Father Tso shouted. He walked toward Jackie, hands outstretched, reaching for the shotgun.

Leaphorn was running now knowing what would happen, knowing how Father Tso planned it to happen, knowing it was the only way it could work.

God forgive Father Tso was shouting and that was all Leaphorn heard. Jackie fired from a crouch. The gunshot boomed like a bomb, surrounding Leaphorn with a blast of sound.

The impact knocked Father Tso backward. He fell on his side. Only after Father Tso lay still did Jackie hear through the booming echoes the sound of Leaphorn running, and spin with his catlike quickness so that the walkie-talkie struck not the back of his head, where Leaphorn had aimed it, but across his temple. Jackie seemed to die instantly, the shotgun spinning from his hand as he fell. Father Tso lived perhaps a minute. Leaphorn picked up the shotgun it was a Remington automatic and knelt beside Tso. Whatever the priest was saying, Leaphorn couldn’t understand it. He put his ear close to Father Tsos face, but now the priest was saying nothing at all. Leaphorn could hear only the echoes of the gunshots dying away and over that the sound of Theodora Adams screaming.

There was no time to plan anything. Leaphorn moved as quickly as he could. He felt rapidly through Jackie’s pockets, finding the padlock key but no additional ammunition for the shotgun. He glanced at the cage. A quick impression of a dozen frightened faces staring at him and of Theodora Adams, sobbing in the corner.

The other ones going to be coming and I’m going to take him, Leaphorn said. Get everybody to sit back down. Don’t give him any hint I’m out here. And with that, Leaphorn ran back into the darkness.

He stopped behind the stalagmites and stared in the direction from which Tull would come. Nothing but blackness. But Tull would surely come. The sound of the shot would have reached him at the cave entrance. And he would have heard the Adams woman screaming. If he came at a run, he should be arriving now. Leaphorn held the shotgun ready, looking down its barrel into the darkness. He swung it toward the glow of light, noticing with satisfaction that the bead sight was lined exactly in the V of the rear sight. He could hear Theodora Adams’s sobbing less hysterical now and more the sound of simple sorrow. For the first time, Leaphorn became conscious of the smell of burned gunpowder.

As soon as Tull came well between him and the light as soon as he could line up the sights on his silhouette he would shoot for the center of the body. There’d be no warning shout. In this darkness, Tull was far too dangerous for that. Leaphorn would simply try to kill him. Time ticked silently away.

But where was Tull? Leaphorn was belatedly conscious that he had underestimated the man. Tull had not jumped to the obvious conclusion that Jackie had shot someone and come running to see about it. If Tull was coming at all, he was coming quietly, with his light turned off, stalking the lighted place to learn what had happened. Leaphorn lowered himself slightly behind the stony barrier, aware that Tull might be somewhere behind him looking for Leaphorns shape against the glow exactly as Leaphorn had looked for Tull’s.

But even as he crouched, even as he registered this increased respect for John Tull as an adversary, Leaphorn felt a fierce exultant certainty of the outcome. No matter how cautious Tull was, the odds had shifted now. Tull would see Jackie and Father Tso on the cave floor and the surviving hostages in the cage. That would account for everyone. He would have to come into the light to get the answers. And he would want to find out what had happened, how Jackie and Tso had died. With his weapon ready, with everyone accounted for, there’d be no reason for him to hold back.

Hey. Tull’s voice came from Leaphorns right well out of the periphery of the lantern light.

What happened? The voice echoed, and died away, and silence resumed.

They fought. It was the voice of the scout leader named Symons. The priest attacked your man and I think they killed each other.

A good answer, Leaphorn thought. Smart.

Where’s Jackie’s gun? Tull shouted. Where’s the shotgun?

I don’t know, Symons said. I don’t see it.

A bright light blinked on suddenly, its beam emerging from behind a screen of stalagmites far beyond the cage. It played over the bodies, searching.

Leaphorn felt a sick disappointment. Tull was even smarter than he’d guessed.

You son-of-a-bitch, Tull shouted. You’ve got the shotgun in there. Throw it out. If you don’t, I’m going to start shooting people.

The light had blinked quickly off, but Leaphorn had him located now. A hint of reflected light, perhaps one hundred yards away. Leaphorn tried to line his sights on it, then lowered the gun. The odds of an effective hit at this range were terrible.

We don’t have the gun, Symons shouted. In the dim light, Leaphorn could see Tull had already without a word raised his pistol.

It was still a high-odds shot, but there was no choice now. Leaphorn steadied the gun, trying to keep the dim form visible over the bead. He squeezed the trigger.

The muzzle flash was blinding. Leaphorn wanted desperately to know if he had hit Tull, but he could see only the whiteness burned on his retina and hear nothing but the reverberating thunder of the gunshot booming down the corridors of the cavern. Then there was the sound of another shot. Tull’s pistol. Leaphorn crouched behind the stone barrier, waiting for sight and hearing to return. He became aware that the butane lantern was out. The darkness here now was total. Tull must have shot out the light. A quick-thinking man. Leaphorn stared into the darkness. What would Tull do? The gunman would know now that another person had somehow gotten into the cave. He might guess that the person was the Navajo policeman. He’d know the policeman had Jackie’s shotgun and

. . . how many rounds of ammunition? Leaphorn opened the magazine, poured three shells out into his hand, and carefully reloaded them. A round in the chamber and three in the magazine. Knowing this, what would Tull do? Not, Leaphorn thought, stand and fight in this blackness with a pistol against a shotgun. The darkness minimized the effect of the pistols range and magnified the effect of the shotguns scattered pattern. Tull would head for the entrance, for the light and the radio. He would call Goldrims for help. And would Goldrims come? Leaphorn thought about it. Goldrims had probably intended to radio to the copter as it passed and order it to land, order the pilot out, and then, if he could fly a copter, fly a few miles, abandon the aircraft and begin a well-planned escape maneuver. If he couldn’t fly a copter, he’d disable it and its radio, fix the pilot so he couldn’t follow, and run. Why return to the cave? Leaphorn could think of no reason. Would he come back to help Tull in the cave? Leaphorn doubted it. Tull had been expendable at the Santa Fe robbery. Why wouldn’t he be expendable now? The contest in this cave would be between John Tull and Joe Leaphorn. Leaphorn felt along the top of the rocky ledge for a flat place, put his flashlight on it, aimed it at the place where Tull had been, and flicked it on. He ducked three long steps to his right and then looked over the top. The flashlight beam shone through a blue haze of gunpowder smoke into a gray-white emptiness. Where Tull had been, there was nothing now. Leaphorn slipped back to the flashlight, flicked it off, aimed it at the place the hostages had been kept, and snapped it on again. The beam fell directly on the body of Father Benjamin Tso and illuminated Theodora Adams, kneeling inside the cage. She covered her eyes against the glare. Leaphorn turned off the flash, and felt his way through the blackness to the cage. He unlocked the padlock with the key he had taken from Jackie’s pocket.

Get the lantern off Jackie’s body, he said. Get everybody away from this place. Find a place to hide until I call for you. He didn’t wait to answer any questions.

The speed with which Leaphorn followed John Tull toward the caves mouth was reduced by a healthy respect for Tull. He skirted far to the left of the direct route, carrying the shotgun at ready. When he finally reached the area where light from the entrance turned the blackness into mere dimness, he found droplets of blood on the gray-white calcite floor. At another point, a smear of reddish brown discolored a limestone outcrop.

Leaphorn guessed it was where Tull had put a bloody hand against the stone. Leaphorn hadn’t missed. The shotgun blast had hit Tull, and hit him hard.

Leaphorn paused and digested this. In a sense, time was now on his side. A shotgun would make a multiple wound, hard to stop bleeding and Tull seemed to be bleeding freely. As time passed, he would weaken. But was the crucial measurement of time here being made by Tull’s pumping heart or by a clockwork mechanism attached to about twenty sticks of dynamite still unaccounted for? Leaphorn decided he couldn’t wait.

Somewhere in the darkness around him, Leaphorn was sure that missing timer and perhaps other timers he had never seen was counting away the seconds.

He found Tull where he thought he would find him at the radio. The man had moved the butane lantern some fifty feet back into the cave from the place where Leaphorn had first seen him and Goldrims, and he’d turned on a battery lantern and adjusted its beam toward part of the cavern. The range of light thus extended substantially beyond the effective range of the shotgun. Leaphorn circled, trying to find an approach that offered some close-in cover. There wasn’t one. The floor here was as dead level as a ballroom.

From it ragged rows of stalagmites rose like a patchwork of volcanic islands from the surface of a still, white sea. Tull had moved the radio behind one such island and the lantern was beside it giving Tull the advantage of deep shadow. From there, he could have a clear shot at anyone trying to get out of the cave mouth via the water. The lake protected one flank and the cave wall another. Approaching him meant walking into the lantern light and into the barrel of his pistol.

Leaphorn glanced at his watch, and considered. His hip now throbbed with a steady pain.

Hey, Tull, he shouted. Lets talk.

Perhaps five seconds passed.

Fine, Tull said. Talk.

He’s not coming back, you know, Leaphorn said. Hell take the money and run. You get stuck.

No, Tull said. But I tell you what. You throw that shotgun out there where I can see it, and well just make you one more hostage. When we cut out of here, you’re a free man.

Otherwise, when my friend gets back, he’s going to be behind you, and I’m going to move in from the front, and were going to kill you.

And that was about the way it would work, if Goldrims did come back, Leaphorn thought.

He would be fairly easy to handle by two men even with the shotgun. But he didn’t think Goldrims would be coming back.

Lets quit kidding each other, Leaphorn said. Your friend is taking the ransom and running.

And you’re supposed to wait around for some more broadcasts, and then you’ll run. And when you run, you’re blowing this place up.

Tull said nothing.

How bad did I hit you?

You missed, Tull said.

You’re lying. I hit you and you’ve been losing blood. And that’s another reason you’re not going to get out of here unless we make a deal. I can keep you in here, and you can keep me in here. Its a Mexican standoff, and we cant afford a standoff because your boss has a bomb set to go. Leaphorn paused, thinking about where he had found the bomb and the circumstances. He didn’t tell you about the bomb, did he?

Screw you, Tull said.

No, Leaphorn thought, he didn’t tell you about the radio setup and the bomb in the room with the sacred paintings. Tull’s tracks hadn’t shown up there, and six sticks of dynamite had been missing when Leaphorn had first found the cache. Probably that bomb had been set up separately. This was a Buffalo Society operation, but part of it, Leaphorn was increasingly certain, might be a very private affair of Goldrims himself.

I’m going to play a tape recording for you, Leaphorn said. He took the recorder from under his shirt and adjusted it. Haven’t heard it myself yet, so we can listen to it together.

It was fastened to a Hallicrafters radio transceiver way back in a side room. There was this radio, with a timer set to turn it on to broadcasting, and let it warm up and then turn on this tape recorder. And after the tape ran, the timer was set to detonate some dynamite in a sack there. You ready for it?

There was silence. Seconds ticked away.

Okay, Tull said. Lets hear it. If it exists.

Leaphorn pushed the on button. Goldrims’s voice boomed out again.

. . . have seen policemen in the territory you agreed would be kept clear of police. You have broken your promise. The Buffalo Society never breaks a promise. Remember this in the future. Remember and learn. We promised that if police came into this corner of the Navajo Nation, the hostages would die. They will now die, and we warriors of the Buffalo Society will die with them. You will find our bodies in our sacred cavern, the mouth of which opens into the San Juan River arm of Lake Powell less than a mile below the present lake-level mouth of the river, approximately twenty-three miles east by northeast of Short Mountain, and exactly at north latitude 36, 11, 17, and west longitude 110,29,3.

To those of the Buffalo Society who seized these white hostages, know that we three warriors kept our honor and our promise. To the white man, come to this cave and recover the bodies of three of your adults and eleven of your young. They died to avenge the deaths of three of our adults and eleven children in the Olds Prairie Murders. With them will be bodies of three warriors of the Buffalo Society: Jackie Noni of the Potawatomi Nation, and John Tull, of the Seminole, and myself, whom the white men call Hoski, or James Tso, a warrior of the Navajo Nation. May our memories live in the glory of the Buffalo Society.

The clear, resonant voice of Goldrims stopped and there was only the faint hiss of the blank tape winding into the take-up reel. Leaphorn pushed the off button and rewound the tape. He felt numb. His logic had told him that Goldrims might kill the hostages to eliminate witnesses, but now he realized that he hadn’t really believed it. The impact of hearing Goldrims’s pleasant, unemotional voice declare this mass murder/mass suicide was stunning. And in that split second, he also became aware that the name of Father Benjamin Tso was missing from the catalog of the dead. He confronted the implications of that gap in the roster. It meant that Goldrims had planned even better than Leaphorn had guessed.

You want to hear it again? Leaphorn shouted. From the beginning this time.

Tull said nothing. Leaphorn pushed the on button. You were warned, the tape began. But our people have seen policemen in the territory . . . When the recorder reached the list of bodies, Leaphorn stopped it. I want you to notice, he shouted to Tull, there’s a name missing from this list. Notice its the name of your buddy’s brother. I want you to think about that.

Leaphorn thought of it himself. Bits of the puzzle fell into place. He knew now who had written the letter summoning Father Benjamin Tso to his grandfathers hogan. Goldrims had written it himself. He felt a chill admiration for the mind that had conceived such a plan. Hoski had realized he could not escape from the manhunt. It would be massive and inexorable. So he had devised a way to abort it. What the dynamite left of his brother, as Hoski had arranged it, would be found with the shattered radio and identified as Hoskis body. Everyone would thus be accounted for. There would be no one left to hunt. As he realized this, Leaphorn also realized that his own problem had been multiplied. Goldrims would have to respond to Tull’s radioed call for help. He couldn’t risk having Leaphorn, or anyone who had seen Father Tso, escape from the cave. Hoski would have to come back.

Leaphorn pushed the play button again, ran the tape, pushed stop, pushed rewind. He was awed by it. Perfect. Flawless. Impeccable. It left nothing to chance. The big score for James Tso would not just be the ransom. The big score would be a new life, free from surveillance, free from hiding. There would be no reason to question the identity of the body. Hoski had never been arrested or fingerprinted. And no one knew the priest was here. No one, that is, who would remain alive. And there was a family resemblance.

Hey, Tull, Leaphorn yelled. Have you counted the bodies? There’s Jackie, and all those Boy Scouts, and the woman, and one of the Tso brothers, and you. You’re there on the list of dead, Tull. But your friend Hoski is going to be alive and well. And wealthy, too.

Tull said nothing.

Goddamn it, Tull, Leaphorn shouted. Think! He’s screwing you. He’s screwing the Buffalo Society. Kelongy wont see a dollar of that ransom. Hoskis going to disappear with it.

Leaphorn listened and heard nothing but the echoes of his own voice dying in the cave.

He hoped Tull was thinking. Hoski would disappear. And someday a man with another name and another identity would appear in Washington, and contact a woman named Rosemary Rita Oliveras. And somewhere, wherever he was hiding, a madman named Kelongy would wonder what went wrong with his crazy scheme and perhaps he would mourn his brilliant lieutenant. But there was no time to think of that now. Leaphorn glanced at his wrist watch. It was 2:47 A.M. In an hour and thirteen minutes it would be time to broadcast the answers that would keep the law at bay for another two hours. What had been Hoskis timing? He had called the helicopter to deliver the ransom at 4 A.M. Probably he would have picked up the money about two-thirty. When was the Hallicrafters set timed to broadcast its tape, and to detonate its bomb? Since Hoski would want to make sure that broadcast was recorded, he’d probably time it at one of the regular two-hour broadcasts.

But how soon? Leaphorn tried to concentrate, to shut out the throbbing of his hip, the aching fatigue, the damp, mushroom smell of this watery part of the cave. It would be soon. Hoski would need very little running time. An hour or two of darkness would be enough to get well clear of the cave and its neighborhood. Because there’d be no search once that tape was aired. There would only be a great flocking of everybody to find this point on the map the smoking mouth of a cave. There would be chaos. The hunted would have been found. Hoski/Goldrims, safely outside the circle of confusion, would simply walk away. Leaphorn was suddenly confident he understood the timing of Hoskis plan.

Tull, Leaphorn shouted. Cant you see the son-of-a-bitch set you up? Use your head.

No, Tull said. Not him. You made that tape up.

Its his voice, Leaphorn shouted. Cant you recognize his voice?

Silence.

He didn’t tell you why he moved his brother away from the Boy Scouts, did he? Leaphorn shouted. He didn’t tell you about this tape. He didn’t tell you about the bomb.

Hell, man, Tull said. I helped him put them together. I’ve got one right here with me, by this radio set here. And when the time comes, its going to blow you to hell.

You and me together, Tull, Leaphorn said. And as he said it, he heard the muffled purring of an outboard motor.

You weren’t here when he made one of those bombs, Leaphorn said. And he didn’t tell you about it. Or about that tape. Or about broadcasting it over that spare radio. Come on, Tull. You were the sucker in Santa Fe. You think you’re immortal, but don’t you get tired of being the one who gets screwed?

Tull said nothing. Over the echoes of his own words, Leaphorn could hear the purring motor.

Think, he shouted. Count the dynamite sticks. There were twenty-four in the box. He used some to seal the other end of the cave. And some in a bomb to wipe out the Scouts, and you probably have a couple there. So does it all add up to twenty-four?

Silence. It wasn’t going to work. The tone of the outboard motor had changed now. It was inside the cave.

You said there was dynamite in a sack by that Hallicrafters, Tull said. Is that what you said? His voice sounded weak now, pained. How many sticks did you say?

Two sticks, Leaphorn said.

How many dynamite caps?

Just one, Leaphorn said. I think just one. With a wire connected. The purring of the outboard stopped.

Ill bet Hoski set the timers himself, Leaphorn said. Ill bet he told you that bomb with you there will go off about six o’clock. You’re going to make the four o’clock broadcast and then cut out and run for it. But he set the timer a couple of hours early.

Hey, Jimmy, Tull yelled. He’s over here.

Whats he have? Hoski yelled. Just Jackie’s shotgun? Is that all? Hoskis voice came from the waters edge, still a long way off.

God damn it, Tull, Leaphorn shouted.

Don’t be stupid. He’s screwing you again, I tell you. He’s got you listed among the dead on that tape, so you gotta be dead when they get here.

He just has the shotgun, Tull shouted. Move around behind him.

He set the timer up on that bomb you have, Leaphorn shouted. Cant you understand he has to kill you, too?

No, Tull said. Jimmy’s my friend. It was almost a scream.

He left you at Santa Fe. He didn’t tell you about that tape. He’s got you listed with the dead. He set the timer . . .

Shut up, Tull said. Shut up. You’re wrong, damn you, and I can prove it. Tull’s voice rose to a scream. God damn you, I can prove you’re wrong.

The tone, the hysteria, told Leaphorn more than the words. He knew, with a sick horror, exactly what Tull meant when he said he could prove it.

He’s talking crap, Goldrims was shouting, his voice much closer now. He’s lying to you, Tull. What the hell are you doing?

Leaphorn was scrambling to his feet.

Tull’s voice was saying: I can just move this little hour hand up to . . .

Don’t, Goldrims screamed, and Tull’s voice was cut off by the sound of a pistol shot.

Leaphorn was running as fast as heart and legs and lungs would let him run, thinking that each yard of distance from the center of the blast increased his chances for survival. From behind him came the sound of Goldrims screaming Tull’s name, and another shot.

And then the blast. It was bright, as if a thousand flash bulbs lit the gray-white interior of the cavern. Then the shock wave hit Leaphorn and sent him tumbling and sliding over the calcite floor, slamming finally into something.

Leaphorn became aware that he could hear nothing and see nothing. Perhaps he had lost consciousness long enough for the echoes to die away. He noticed his nose was bleeding and felt below his face. There were only a few drops of wetness on the stony floor. Little time had passed.

He sat up gingerly. When the flash blindness subsided enough so that he could read his watch, it was 2:57. Leaphorn hurried. First he found his flashlight behind the rocks where he had left it, with the shotgun nearby. Next he found two boats a small three-man affair with an outboard engine, and a flat-bottomed fiberglass model with a muffled inboard. In its bottom was a green nylon backpack and a heavy canvas bag. Leaphorn zipped the bag open. Inside were dozens of small plastic packages. Leaphorn fished one out, opened it and shone his flashlight onto tight bundles of twenty-dollar bills. He returned the pouch and carried the backpack and bag into the cave. Near the blackened area where James Tso and John Tull had died, he stopped, swung the heavy bag and sent the ransom money sliding down the cave floor into the darkness.

By the time he had everyone in the boats it was after 3 A.M.

At ten minutes after three, both boats purred out of the cave mouth and into open water.

The night seemed incredibly bright. It was windless. A half moon hung halfway down the western sky. Leaphorn quickly got his directions. It was probably eighty miles down the lake to the dam and the nearest telephone at least four or five hours. Leaphorns hip throbbed. To hell with that, he thought. There would surely be aerial surveillance. Let someone else do some work. He picked up the spare gasoline can, screwed off the cap, floated it on the lake surface, and as it drifted away blasted it with his shotgun. It erupted into flame and burned, a bright blue-white beacon reflecting from the water, lighting the cliff walls around them, lighting the dirty, exhausted faces of eleven Boy Scouts. Normally it wouldn’t be noticed in this lonely country. But tonight it would be. Tonight anything would be noticed.

At three-forty-two he heard the plane. High at first, but circling. Leaphorn pointed his flashlight up. Blinked it off and on. The plane came low, buzzed the boat with landing lights on. It looked like an army reconnaissance craft.

Now Leaphorn was keeping his eye on the dark shape where cliff and water met and the darkness that hid the cave mouth. The second hand of his watch swept past 4 A.M.

Nothing happened. The hand swept down, and up, and down again. At 4:02 the blackness at the cliff base became a blinding flash of white light. Seconds passed. A tremendous

muffled thump echoed across the water, followed by a rumbling. Slabs of rocks falling inside the cave. Too many rocks for the white men to remove to clear the path to Standing Medicines sand paintings, Leaphorn thought. But not too many rocks to remove to salvage a canvas bag heavy with cash. A foot-high shock wave from the blast spread rapidly toward them across the mirror like surface of the lake. The reflected stars rippled. It reached the boat, rocked it abruptly, and moved down the lake.

They sat, waiting.

Leaphorn stared over the side, into the clear, dark water. Somewhere down below would be the hiding place of the helicopter, and the grave of Haas. He imagined how it happened. Haas with a gun in his ribs hovering the craft over this same boat, the bank loot being lowered into it, the passengers climbing down. Had they shot him then, or left a bomb aboard to be triggered when the copter was a safer fifty yards away? Whatever method, it left a trail impossible to follow.

From down the lake came the sound of another helicopter, traveling low and fast toward them.

How many, like Haas, had died to make Goldrims’s trail impossible to follow? Hosteen Tso and Anna Atcitty, certainly, and almost certainly Frederick Lynch. Leaphorn considered how it must have happened. Goldrims had been told of the secret cavern as the oldest son. He had stocked it as the base for this operation, and killed his grandfather to keep the secret safe. Then he must have returned to Washington. Why Washington?

Kelongy must be there with the Buffalo Society’s funds from the Santa Fe robbery. And when the time came for the kidnapping, Goldrims had returned to Safety Systems, Inc., and taken the dog he had coveted and corrupted and his ex-employers car, and left Frederick Lynch in no condition to report the theft and in no place where he would ever be found again. That crime, Leaphorn guessed, would have been as much personal vendetta as motivated by actual need. As for Tull, he was simply something useful. And as for Benjamin Tso . . .

Theodora Adams interrupted his thoughts. Why did Ben do that? she asked, in a choked voice. It was like he knew he would be killed. Did he do it to save me?

Leaphorn opened his mouth and closed it. Ben did it to save himself, he thought. But he didn’t say it. It wasn’t something he could explain to her if she didn’t already understand it.