The Blessing Way

"But we can't possibly…"

"Get up," McKee ordered. His voice was hoarse. "Get on your feet. I'll help you."

"I'm not going," Miss Leon said.

"You're going, and right now." McKee's voice was grim. He gripped her arm and lifted her to her feet, surprised at how light she seemed. The box of crackers was on the rock where he had left it. How could he have been silly enough to bring crackers?

She tried to jerk away from his grip, and then faced him. McKee noticed there were tears in her eyes.

"You've got a concussion. We just can't go stumbling around like this. We've got to get you to a doctor. Please," she said. "Please, Dr. McKee. Please come back to the camp and Dr. Canfield will help you."

McKee looked at her. There was dust on her face and a tear had streaked it. He looked away, feeling baffled and helpless. Maybe he would have to tell her about Canfield.

"Come on," he said. "I'll help you."

"You're hurting my arm."

McKee was suddenly conscious of the feel of her arm under his fingers, of the softness under the shirt sleeve. He jerked his hand away.

Miss Leon ran. She spun away from him and ran lightly down the rocks toward the Volkswagen. McKee stood, too surprised to move, thinking; There's nothing wrong with her ankle. Then he swore, and ran after her, clumsily because of his injured hand. Before he reached the Volkswagen, she had rolled up the windows and locked herself in. For a wild moment, McKee thought she would start the car and drive off and he had a vision of himself trying to keep himself in front of the Volkswagen-performing an idiotic game of dodgem in reverse. But she simply sat behind the wheel, looking at him.

He tapped on the window, and tried to keep his voice sounding normal.

"Really, Miss Leon. I'm not crazy. And we really do have to get out of here."

Miss Leon looked at him. He saw no fear in her expression, nor anger. She simply looked worried.

"Roll down the window."

"Not until you give me your word of honor you'll go back to the camp."

Her voice was faint through the glass.

My day for breaking windows, McKee thought. He picked up a rock, and wrapped the handkerchief around his left hand again. He saw Miss Leon looked frightened now.

"Roll it down."

"No."

McKee hesitated. He thought of Jeremy's body, and of the sand on his face. Breaking his word would be quicker than the window.

"I promise," he said. "Let me in and we'll go back to camp."

"I don't know now," Miss Leon said. "I'm not sure I can trust you."

Good lord, McKee thought. Women left him utterly baffled.

He held up the rock.

"Open up, or I break in."

Miss Leon unlocked the door and he pulled it open.

"Get out now. No more of this horsing around. Get out of there or I'll have to drag you out."

Miss Leon got out. He gripped her arm and walked with her rapidly up the canyon. And then he stopped.

A tall man wearing a new black hat emerged from the screen of bushes just in front of them.

He was the Big Navajo who had been shopping in Shoemaker's. In his right hand he held a machine pistol, pointed approximately at McKee's stomach. It was of shiny, gunmetal blue-something which would have reflected in the moonlight.

"That's right," the man said. "Just stand still."

He walked across the rocks toward them, keeping his eyes on McKee.

The pistol, McKee saw, had a wire stock, now folded down, and a long cartridge magazine extending downward from the chamber.

"You're Bergen McKee," the man said. "And the young lady would be Ellen Leon."

McKee pulled Miss Leon's arm, moving her behind him.

"What do you want?"

The man smiled at McKee. It was a pleasant smile. And the face was pleasant. A long, raw-boned Navajo face, with heavy eyebrows and a generous mouth. McKee saw he wore short braids, tied with red cord.

"Just the pleasure of your company for a while," the big man said. "But right now I want you to take that hand out of your shirt front, very, very slowly."

McKee pulled out the hand.

"Well," the man said. "I see I've been too suspicious." He smiled again. "That's quite a finger."

McKee said nothing.

"Now, I'll have you put your hands against that tree." He flicked the long barrel of the pistol toward the trunk of a piñon. "Lean against it while I see what you have in those pockets. And, Ellen, you stand over here where I can watch you."

The man stood behind McKee and searched him deftly. He pulled out the cans of meat and dropped them, took the pickup keys and his billfold, ran his hand quickly around McKee's belt line and patted his shirt. Then the hand was gone, but the voice came from directly behind him.

"You will hold that position until I finish checking Miss Leon's possessions. I don't want any movement at all. I don't have to tell you that I will use this pistol."

"No," Bergen said glumly. "You don't."

He heard the voice telling Miss Leon to hold her arms out. McKee looked back over his shoulder.

The blow was so sudden and vicious that he dropped to his knees and huddled against the pain of it. The man had jabbed him, full strength, above the kidney with the muzzle of the pistol.

"You didn't pay attention to what I said," he heard the man saying. "I said not to move. But now you can get up."

McKee pulled himself to his feet. He had hurt his finger again and his hand throbbed violently. He saw Miss Leon looking at him, her face very white. The man was looking at him too, still smiling slightly. He wore a black shirt and denims tucked into the tops of his boots.

"You know, I almost missed you again," the man said. He stopped smiling. "You've been a hell of a lot of trouble. When we have a little time I want you to tell me how you got away from me last night at your camp. That's been puzzling me." The man stopped a moment, staring at McKee.

"I think I know why I didn't catch you at my tree. You were farther down the canyon than I thought you could be and you heard the winch. Didn't you?"

"That's right," McKee said.

"I almost waited there too long," the man said. "You were smart enough to run, but then you gave away your advantage. I wonder why you waited for me here." He looked at McKee thoughtfully. "You could have made me hunt you another day," he said. "Why did you stop? Did you give up?"

McKee didn't look at Miss Leon.

"We didn't think anyone would know where we were."

The Navajo laughed. He seemed genuinely amused. "If you didn't know this was the only way out, I had some luck with you."

"Who the hell are you?" McKee asked. "And what do you want with us?"

"Let's go now. You will walk a little ahead and do as you're told."

He turned the machine pistol sideways, and tapped the safety button beside the trigger guard.

"I carry it cocked, with the safety off. It's a .38 caliber and I'm good with it."

"I'll bet you are," McKee said.

The man kept well behind them as they walked past the brush and over the rocks. McKee walked silently, trying to think.

Miss Leon touched his arm. "I'm sorry." Her voice was very small.

"Nothing to be sorry for."

"If I hadn't been so stupid," she whispered. "I thought it was because you had hurt your head."

"What else could you think? It still seems crazy."

"I'm sorry. You could have gotten away."

"I should have been able to manage it anyway," McKee said. His voice was bitter.

"How did he know our names?"

"He looked through the papers in our tent," McKee said. "I guess he saw them there."

"No talking," the Navajo said. "Save your breath."

They walked in silence up the sand and around the outcropping where Canfield's camper was parked.

"We'll stop here a moment," the man said.

McKee saw Miss Leon looking at the truck. He was glad he had had sense enough to close the tailgate.

I noticed you looked in it," the man said. "I wish you hadn't broken that window. What did you think that would accomplish? It's going to look funny."

The Navajo moved toward the pickup, watching them as he did. He glanced inside and then briefly inspected the broken window.

"This Canfield seemed like a nice fella," he said. "Full of jokes."

"Then why did you kill him?" McKee asked fiercely. He spoke in Navajo.

The big man looked at him, as if trying to understand the question. He answered in English. "Just bad luck. There wasn't any other way to handle it." He looked at McKee solemnly and pursed his lips. The expression was rueful. "Have to go on now," he said. "It's more than a mile to my car and a lot of climbing."

Within a few hundred yards, the going became increasingly difficult. The canyon floor rose sharply now and was choked by brush and tumbled boulders. McKee climbed stolidly, helping Miss Leon when he could and trying to think. What kind of a monster was this? He seemed perfectly sane, as if this crazy episode were simply business. He had apparently killed Jeremy as unemotionally as he would swat a fly. McKee was absolutely certain he would kill Miss Leon and him with the same coolness. And, as usual, he could do nothing about it. He had thought about turning suddenly and trying to hit the man with a rock. But his right hand was almost useless and the Navajo kept a cautious distance behind them.

It didn't seem likely the man would leave them alive, not with the knowledge that he was a murderer. But why hadn't he simply shot them by the camper? McKee had sensed that the man had considered this, at least for a moment, after he had confirmed that Canfield's body was still in the truck. But he had dropped the idea. He must have some use for us alive, McKee thought. Either that, or he wants our bodies somewhere else, and it's easier to have us walk. But why? The man seemed sane but there was no conceivable sanity in any of this.

"We'll climb out here," the Navajo said. He indicated a gap in a rockslide which had broken out of the south wall of the canyon. "You go first, Dr. McKee. When you reach the top you will lie down with your feet sticking out over the rim where I can see them. Ellen will be just ahead of me and if you try anything foolish I will have to shoot her so I can come after you. Do you understand how it will work?"

He studied McKee's face.

"You may think I'm bluffing. I'm not. I don't really think I'll need Miss Leon."

McKee looked at her. She stood just below him, breathing heavily from the exertion, her face damp with perspiration. She attempted a smile.

Somehow, McKee thought, I'm going to get her out of this. Even if it kills me.

He began climbing. It was slow because of his right hand, and by the time he reached the top he was drained with exhaustion. He lowered himself onto the rimrock, with his feet jutting out.

"Stay on your stomach," the voice from below ordered.

The position left him completely helpless. He couldn't move without the Navajo seeing him and he had no doubt at all that the man would kill Miss Leon the moment he did. He wondered what the man had meant about probably not needing her. Why would he need her? And why did he need him?

The Navajo reached the top before Miss Leon and stood well aside while she finished the climb.

"Walk right over there to the truck," he said. McKee saw the Land-Rover almost hidden behind a growth of juniper.

"But first hold that hand out so I can see it."

McKee held out his left hand, palm open.

"Are you left-handed, Dr. McKee?"

"No. I'm right-handed."

"I was afraid you would be. Let me see it."

McKee slowly raised his injured hand. He suppressed a wince as motion renewed the pain. The sun was directly south now and that might explain some of the weakness in his legs. It was noon and he hadn't eaten anything since yesterday afternoon.

"That looks bad," the Navajo said. "We may have to soak it to get that swelling down."

McKee saw that Miss Leon was also staring at his hand. He dropped it, flinched again, and the blood drained into it.

"I'm touched by your sympathy," McKee said.

The Navajo chuckled. "It's not really that," he said, grinning at McKee. "It's just that I have to have you write a letter for us."

Chapter 14

There is no comfortable way, McKee found, to lie face down on the back seat of a moving vehicle with his wrists tied together and roped to his ankles. The best he could arrange involved staring directly at the back of the front seat. By looking out of the right corner of his eye, he could see the back of the Big Navajo's neck. The man had his hat pushed forward on his forehead. That would be because they were driving west and the sun was low through the windshield. By looking down his cheek, he could see Miss Leon, sitting stiffly against the right door of the Land-Rover, as far as she could get from the Indian.

The Land-Rover lurched over something and McKee spread his knees to keep from shifting on the seat. Making the move started the throbbing again in his right hand. The Navajo was saying something but it was lost in dizziness.

"I don't know," Miss Leon said.

"How about you? How long were you planning to stay?"

The question sounded so ordinary and social that McKee had an impulse to laugh. But when Miss Leon had answered two or three days, the Navajo had turned his head toward her. There was a long silence then, and when the Navajo spoke again, McKee realized the question had not been casual at all.

"Did anyone know where you were going?"

"Everyone knew."

"This Dr. Green at Albuquerque knew," the Navajo said. "Who else? What about your husband? Did he know you were coming to this canyon?"

"I don't have a husband."

There was another silence then.

"Who else knew then?" the Navajo asked.

"Some other friends of mine, of course, and my family. Why? What difference does it make?"

"Another thing. Why did McKee sit around in the canyon and let me cut him off?"

"Ask him," Miss Leon said.

"You tell me," the Navajo said.

"Because I was a fool," Miss Leon said.

"You slow him down?" The Navajo chuckled. "Didn't you believe there was a Navajo Wolf?"

"He had that horrible bruise on his forehead," Miss Leon said, "I thought it was that."

"Well, I would have got him anyway."

"No," she said. "If it hadn't been for me, Dr. McKee would have gotten away."

"Maybe you don't know about us Navajo Wolves. We turn ourselves into coyotes, and dogs, bears, foxes, owls, and crows."

McKee stared at the back of the Navajo's head. He had ticked off the litany of were-animals in a voice heavy with sarcasm. And he listed bears, and owls, and crows. There had been a scholarly argument about that when Greersen first published his book about witchcraft beliefs in the 1920's. Greer-sen had listed only one account of each. The bear story had come out of the Navajo Mountain district and the owl and crow incidents were both far to the east-over on the Checkerboard Reservation in New Mexico. McKee had never found a source who knew of more than were-dogs, werewolves, and were-coyotes. The big man must have read Greersen, and that had to mean he had researched somewhere with an anthropological library. But why, and where?

"And we fly through the air when it's dark and we need to," the Navajo was saying. "McKee wouldn't have got away."

"He'd already gotten away once." Miss Leon's voice was angry and insistent. "He outsmarted you last night. And today he outsmarted you again. He…"

"Lady. Drop it. You don't know who I am. Nobody gets away."

That had ended the conversation. The Land-Rover had turned sharply and tilted downward-moving mostly in first gear down the narrow bottom of a dry wash. And after what McKee guessed must have been three or four miles there was the feel of smooth flat sand under the wheels and the Navajo drove much faster. There was no sun on the Land-Rover now and McKee was sure they were back on the floor of Many Ruins but he wasn't sure of directions.

A dull pain from the bruise on his forehead and the throbbing of his hand made it difficult to concentrate. Who was the Navajo? In this part of the Reservation, The People linked owls with ghosts, but not with witches, and gave crows and ravens no supernatural significance at all. Obviously, the man's tone was heavily ironic when he listed the birds and animals. McKee could think of no source for such a list except Greersen's Case Studies in Navajo Ethnographic Aberrations. It was a notoriously ponderous and difficult volume intended for cultural anthropologists. Why would the Navajo read such a book? When McKee tried to make sense of this, his mind kept turning to the sound of Ellen Leon's voice defending him. "He outsmarted you," she had said.

The Land-Rover stopped and McKee heard the hand brake go on.

"You stay here," the Indian said. "Don't try to untie McKee and don't try anything funny."

And then the door opened, the big man was gone, and Miss Leon was leaning over the back of the seat. She looked dusty, disheveled, very tired, and very sympathetic. "Are you all right?" she asked.

"Where are we? Where did he go?"

"At the tree," Miss Leon said. "The one he pulled across the canyon. Are you all right?"

"What's he doing? Putting on the winch?"

"Yes. Dr. McKee, I'm sorry I was such a silly fool. I didn't…"

"I couldn't hear part of the conversation. Did he tell you anything useful? Who he was, or anything like that?"

"No. I don't think so. He said nobody ever got away from him."

"I heard that," McKee said. "Did he say anything else?"

"I can't think of anything." She paused. "He asked me why we waited in the canyon so he could catch us."

"I heard that, too. Don't worry about it."

And then he heard the big man climbing back into the Land-Rover. There was the sound of shifting gears, the whine of the winch, and the cracking noise of limbs breaking. Then the winch stopped and the man climbed out again.

"I want you to be very, very careful," McKee said. "Do exactly what he tells you to do. And keep your eyes open. Watch for a chance to get away. If you can get out of his sight, hide. Hide and don't move until it's pitch dark and then get out of the canyon. Go to Shoemaker's. That's south by southwest of here. You know how to tell your directions at night?"

"Yes," Ellen said.

She probably doesn't, McKee thought, but it seemed entirely academic.

"Find the Big Dipper," McKee said. "The two stars in the line at the end of the cup point to the Pole Star. That's due north."

"He's coming back," she said.

"Remember. Watch for a chance."

And then the big man was leaning over the seat, looking at him. "I hope you were giving Miss Leon good advice."

"I told her to follow orders."

"That's good advice," the Navajo said.

They drove about ten minutes by McKee's estimate before the Land-Rover stopped again.

This time you better come along, Miss Leon," the man said. "Slide out on my side."

"Where are you taking her?" McKee's voice was loud.

"I won't hurt her," the man said. "We're just going to get some of your papers."

McKee twisted his shoulders and neck, straining to see out the rear window. Only the top of the cliff was in his line of sight, but it was enough to confirm that they were at their camping place.

They were gone only a moment. And then the Land-Rover was moving again, smoothly at first up the sandy floor of Many Ruins and then a jolting, twisting ride. Suddenly they weren't moving. McKee heard the hand brake pulled on.

"I see you got a woman, George. Where's the man you were after?"

The voice was soft. A Virginia accent, McKee thought, or maybe Carolina or Maryland.

"In the back seat," the Navajo said. "Get out, Miss Leon."

The door by McKee's head opened and he saw a man looking down at him. On his stomach, with his head turned to one side, McKee could see only out of the corner of his right eye. He could see a belt buckle, and a navy-blue vest with black buttons, and the bottom of the man's chin and up his nostrils.

"He's tied up," the voice above him said. It seemed to McKee a remarkably stupid thing to say.

"Move a little bit out of the way," the Navajo said. Then McKee felt the Indian's hands, deftly untying the knots.

"Get any calls while you were gone?" the soft voice asked. "Do they know when we can haul out of this hole?"

"No calls," the Big Navajo said. "You see anything?"

"No," the soft voice said. "Just that kid on the horse again. Up on the top. Way off across the mesa."

"You can get up now, Dr. McKee."

McKee sat up and examined the man with the blue vest. He was a tall young man with a pale face shaded by a light-blue straw hat. He looked back at McKee and nodded politely-blue eyes under blond eyebrows-and then turned toward Miss Leon.

"How do you do," he said. Ellen Leon ignored him.

The young man wore a harness over his vest supporting a shoulder holster with a semi-automatic pistol in it. McKee didn't recognize the type, but it seemed to be about .38 caliber. Miss Leon stood stiffly in front of the truck. She looked frightened.

"Come on," the Big Navajo said. "Get out now. I'm in a hurry."

McKee climbed out of the Land-Rover, his muscles stiff. His head ached, but the ache was lost in the violent throbbing of his injured hand. He held it stiffly at his side and glanced around.

They were up a narrow side canyon. Below, not more than two hundred yards, McKee could see the broad sandy bed of Many Ruins bright in the afternoon sun. Here there was shadow and it was a moment before he noticed the cliff dwelling high on the sandstone wall behind the blond man. It was large for an Anasazi ruin-built in a long horizontal fault cleft some forty feet above the talus slope and protected from above by the sloping overhang of the cliff. He wondered, fleetingly, if it was one of those excavated by the Harvard-Smithsonian teams. It would be hard to reach, but that made it all the more attractive to the archaeologists. Less chance it had been disturbed.

"Dr. McKee is going to write that letter for us, Eddie," the Navajo said. "It may take some time, and while I'm thinking about the letter, you want to be thinking about McKee. He's tricky."

"He hasn't written it yet?" the blond man asked. He sounded surprised.

"I could have had him write it back at his camp," the Indian said. "I think I could handle him. Ninety-nine chances out of a hundred. But why take chances with one this slippery?"

"Too much money involved," Eddie said. "Way too much money for taking chances."

He slipped the pistol deftly from the holster, handling it, McKee noticed glumly, as naturally as a pipe smoker handles a pipe.

"Don't talk so much," the Big Navajo said. "We're going to leave these two behind and the less they hear the better."

Eddie said, "Oh?" The word came out as another question.

The Navajo reached into the Land-Rover, pulled out a pile of papers, stacked them on the hood, sorted swiftly through them, extracted a letter, and skimmed it.

"How about this Dr. Green? Looks like he's your boss. He'd probably be the one to write."

"Green's chairman of the department," McKee said. "We usually try to keep in touch when we're in the field."

How long, McKee wondered, had Canfield lived after he wrote his note for this man? Just long enough for the Navajo to kill him without marks of violence. Only one thing was clear in this incredible situation-the Navajo's need for this letter was all that kept Miss Leon and himself alive. He wouldn't write it, but it had to be handled exactly right.

The Big Navajo handed him Dr. Canfield's ballpoint pen. It was a slim silver pen, and as McKee accepted it with his left hand he felt his resolution harden. He would never, under any circumstances, write this letter.

"I didn't find any stationery so I guess you use your notebook?"

"That's right," McKee said.

"We'll make it to Dr. Green," the Navajo said. "What do you call him? Dr. Green? Or his first name?"

"Dr. Green," McKee lied. "He's pretty stuffy."

The Navajo looked at him thoughtfully. "What was Dr. Canfield's first name? Was it John?"

"John Robert Canfield," McKee said.

The Big Navajo studied him.

"Dr. McKee," he said finally, "what happened to Dr. Canfield was too bad. It couldn't be helped because Dr. Canfield tried to get away and he didn't leave me any alternative. But there is no reason at all for you and Miss Leon to die. If this letter is written properly it will give us time to finish what we are doing here. And then we will leave and we can afford to leave you behind." He said all this very slowly, watching McKee intently. McKee kept his expression studiously noncommittal.

"You may doubt that, but it's true. When we are finished here, there will be no way at all to trace us. If you cooperate, we can leave you up in that cliff dwelling with food and water. In time, perhaps you could find a way to get down. If not, someone will come in here sooner or later and find you."

"What happens if I don't write the letter?"

The Navajo's expression remained perfectly pleasant.

"Then I'll have to kill you both. Without the letter we'd have to hurry. You would slow us down some, because someone will have to watch you. Nothing personal about it, Dr. McKee. It's simply a matter of money." He smiled. "You know our Origin Myth. That's what witchcraft is all about-the way to make money."

"What do you want me to write?" McKee asked.

"That's part of the problem. We want a letter to Dr. Green telling him that you're leaving this canyon and going somewhere else-somewhere it would be natural for you to go. You and Dr. Canfield and Miss Leon. And it has to be written so that Dr. Green won't suspect anything."

The Big Navajo paused, staring at McKee.

"You can see that, can't you? If someone gets worried and comes in here looking for you, we would simply have to kill you."

I have to do this exactly right, McKee thought.

"I don't think I can believe you," he said. "You killed John after he wrote the letter."

"Your Dr. Canfield was very foolish. He wrote you the note, and then he tried to escape. He jumped me."

"I see," McKee said.

"And I think that Dr. Canfield warned you somehow in that note of his. What was it? Why were you expecting me?"

McKee grinned. "You're right, of course. It was the name. His name's Jeremy. When I saw that signature I knew something was wrong. I'd been over to the Yazzie hogan and found those rams you killed and I was nervous about that anyway."

McKee was satisfied that his voice had sounded natural. He hoped desperately that his timing had been right. Maybe he should have waited longer, but he saw a slight relaxation in the Navajo's face. It's like poker, he thought, and this man's weakness, if he has one, is his vanity.

"You shouldn't try anything like that."

"I don't have any reason to trust you," McKee said. "Just one thing. You kill one man and they hunt for you awhile but it is not so very unusual. You kill two men and a woman and it's something nobody forgets and they keep looking for you."

He was watching the Navajo's face. It relaxed a little more. "You've been thinking of that, haven't you?" McKee asked.

"This is just business with me, Dr. McKee," the Navajo said. "A way to make a lot of money. You're right. The more people who get hurt, the harder they hunt."

. With an effort, McKee avoided looking at the blond man. From the corner of his eye, he had seen a faint smile on Eddie's face.

"All right," McKee said. "What do you think we should say?"

"Well. You'll have to say you're leaving here. All of you." He paused. "Say you are leaving day after tomorrow. A day after we mail this at Shoemaker's."

McKee tried to seem thoughtful. "Canfield was looking for Folsom Man artifacts in the Anasazi ruins," he said, aware that the Navajo must already know that. "We'll say he wasn't finding any around here and that I haven't had much luck finding anyone willing to talk about witchcraft incidents."

He glanced up at the Navajo's face.

"If you don't believe that's true, you can send somebody back to get my notes. That really is what I'm working on."

"I believe you," the Navajo said. "Write it here on the hood of the truck."

The son of a bitch read my notes, McKee thought. He felt elated. Then he saw Ellen Leon watching him, her face without expression. The elation died. She thinks I'm a coward or a fool, he thought. Maybe that was best.

"I'll tell Green that we're moving on up into the Monument Valley country in Utah-where the Navajos are less exposed to outside influences and less accultured. That would make sense for both of us. Canfield is…" He hesitated a second, sickened at this play-acting. "Canfield was trying to establish some pattern of Folsom Man hunting camps in this area. The early pueblo builders collected Folsom lance points and kept them as totems. That would be a good place for him to be looking."

He was fairly confident that the big man knew all about what both of them were doing, and he tried to make his voice sound persuasive. He doubted if the man knew about Ellen Leon. There was nothing mentioning her in the tent. Just her brief note.

"And it would be a natural place for me to work. In the back country is where you find people still believing in the Navajo Wolves."

"How about Miss Leon?"

"I told him I was just your graduate assistant," Miss Leon interrupted, "but I don't think he believes me."

"Green would naturally expect her to go along with us," McKee said. "That's what she gets paid for. To help."

He paused again, thinking of the sand on Canfield's lips and that something might go wrong with this plan.

"That sound all right?" he asked.

The Big Navajo moved his thumb absently back and forth over his finger tips, studying McKee's face.

"Does Green have any schedule of where you're supposed to go next?"

"We didn't have any definite plans."

"Would Green be writing you anywhere? Anywhere set up to pick up letters?"

"Just Shoemaker's while we were here." He noticed Miss Leon was still looking at him and he felt himself flush. "We tell him where to forward to if we move. He'd get this letter from me saying where we were going and telling him to send our mail to the store at Mexican Water. It seems natural. You think he'd check on it?"

"Let's see how it looks on paper," the Navajo said.

McKee had been holding his right hand straight down. It had hurt, but the increased blood pressure should, he thought, build up the swelling. He raised it now, intending to feign pain. No pretense was necessary. The hurt was so far beyond what he had expected that his gasp was involuntary. He felt sweat on his face and nausea in his throat. When he finally rested his right forearm on the hood, he slumped against the truck, breathing hard, too dizzy to notice whether the Navajo had registered all this. I can't spoil this now, he thought. He has to believe I'm really trying.

"I'll start it, 'Dear Dr. Green,'" he said. His voice was thick.

He moved his right hand slowly and took the pen between his thumb and forefinger. In a moment he had one more gamble to make. He would suggest that he try to write the letter with his left hand, explaining to Dr. Green that he had injured his right one. He didn't think the big man would call this bluff. If the man was as smart as he seemed to be, he would see the objections. Green would wonder why Canfield hadn't written instead. And he would wonder why McKee wasn't coming in for medical attention. And the handwriting would be unidentifiable anyway-and that obviously was important. But, if he didn't see the objections, this whole desperate play for time might collapse.

He shifted the pen into the proper position, lowered the point and started the "D." The Navajo was watching him intently.

Again, a fresh wave of pain helped his performance. The flinch was completely Involuntary, the spasm of a tortured nerve.

"Don't write it," Miss Leon said suddenly. T don't trust him."

The Navajo turned toward her.

"Ellen," McKee said hurriedly, "if you had shown a little sense earlier we wouldn't be here. If you'd use what little brains you have, you'd see that this letter is our only way out of this mess. Now shut up."

He hoped, as he said it, that the anger would sound sincere to the Navajo and insincere to Miss Leon and thought bitterly that the reverse would probably be true. The hurt in Miss Leon's face looked genuine and the Navajo's expression was unreadable.

He tried again with the pen, finishing the "Dear" this time, and inspected the wavering scrawl with satisfaction.

"That's fairly close," he said. It looked nothing at all like his handwriting and the Navajo had plenty of samples in his field notes to make the comparison.

"It's not close enough," the Navajo said.

"How about writing it with my left hand?" McKee said suddenly. "We could say I'd hurt my right one." He tried to make his glance at the Indian seem natural, and held his breath.

"Dr. McKee. Think about it. That wouldn't look like your handwriting. If it doesn't look like your handwriting, it won't work no matter what you say." The Navajo was looking at McKee curiously. "Why would you write Dr. Green a lefthanded letter with Dr. Canfield around to write letters?"

"Just a thought," McKee mumbled.

The Navajo looked at his watch and then, for a long moment, at the man called Eddie. Eddie shrugged. "Whatever you think," he said. "I don't know the odds."

McKee was suddenly chillingly aware that his life was being decided. The Navajo looked at him, his face bland, with no trace of malice or anger. McKee was conscious of the ragged line rimming the iris of the Indian's eyes, of the blackness of the pupils; conscious that behind that blackness an intelligence was balancing whatever considerations it gave weight and deciding whether he would die.

"The hell of it is," the Big Navajo said, "we don't know how long we're stuck here."

"Whatever you think," Eddie said again. "Lot of money involved."

"Let's see that hand again," the Indian ordered.

McKee raised it slowly, palm upward, toward the Navajo.

He leaned slightly forward, scrutinizing the twisted finger. Like, McKee thought, a housewife inspecting a slightly off-color roast.

"Maybe soaking it will get that swelling down," the Indian said. "Soak it in hot water and get the swelling out. We'll take 'em up to the cliff place, Eddie."

From behind him, McKee heard a faint click.

Eddie had slipped the safety catch on his automatic back into place.

"It's almost four o'clock," the Navajo said. "The hell of it is with this job we never know how much time we have."

Chapter 15

At approximately four o'clock Joe Leaphorn, sweating profusely, led his borrowed horse the last steep yards to the top of the ridge behind Ceniza Mesa. Almost immediately he found exactly what he had hoped to find. And when he found it the pieces of the puzzle locked neatly into place-confirming his meticulously logical conclusions. He knew why Luis Horseman had been killed. He knew, with equal certainty, that the Big Navajo had done the killing. The fact that he had no idea how he could prove it was not, for the moment, important.

At about ten minutes after four o'clock, Lieutenant Leaphorn found something he had not expected to find on the Ceniza ridge. And suddenly he was no longer sure of anything. This unexpected fact visible at his feet fell like a stone in a reflecting pool, turning the mirrored image into shattered confusion. The answer he had found converted itself into another question. Leaphorn no longer had any idea why Horseman had died. He was, in fact, more baffled than ever.

Leaphorn had left the Chinle subagency at noon, towing Sam George Takes's horse and trailer, determined to learn what the Big Navajo had been doing at Ceniza Mesa. At first he drove faster than he should because he was worried. Billy Nez had come home from the Enemy Way, picked up his rifle, and left again on his pony. Charley Nez, as usual, didn't know where he had gone. But Leaphorn could guess. And he didn't like the conclusion. He was sure Billy Nez would ride to the place where Luis Horseman had hidden. Nez would pick up the tracks of the Big Navajo's Land-Rover there, and he would follow it. Because Leaphorn couldn't think his way through the puzzle of Luis Horseman's death, he had no idea what Nez would find-if anything. And because Leaphorn didn't know, he worried.

Leaphorn began driving more slowly and worrying less as the carryall climbed the long slope past Many Farms. He had been working his way methodically around the crucial question, the question which held the key to this entire affair, the question of motive. By the time the carryall reached the summit of the grade and began the gradual drop to Agua Sal Wash the answer was taking shape. He pulled off the asphalt, parked on the shoulder and sat, examining his potential solution for flaws. He could find no serious ones, and that eliminated his worry about young Nez. Nez almost certainly wouldn't find the Big Navajo on the Lukachukai plateau. The man would be long gone. And, if he did find him, it wouldn't matter much unless Nez did something remarkably foolish.

Leaphorn went through his solution again, looking for a hole. The Big Navajo must have found the Army's missing rocket on Ceniza Mesa.

Why, Leaphorn asked himself angrily, had he been so quick to reject this idea when he learned the reward was canceled? The Big Navajo had been clearing a track to the top when Billy Nez found him and stole the hat. He would have needed such a road to haul the remains down. And then he had cached the rocket somewhere until he could find out how to collect the reward. Horseman had found the rocket and claimed it. A Navajo would not kill for money, but he would kill in anger. The two had fought-fought in some sandy arroyo bottom. Horseman had been smothered. And the Big Navajo had moved his body down to Teastah Wash. Why? "To avoid having the area where his rocket was hidden searched by Law and Order people looking for Horseman." Now the Big Navajo was waiting, with the inbred patience of the Dinee, for the moment when sun, wind, and birdsong made the time seem right to claim the Army's $10,000. Or perhaps he had learned by now that the reward had been canceled. It seemed to make little difference. Leaphorn could think of no possible way to connect the missile with the murder.

He looked out across the expanse of the Agua Sal Valley, past Los Gigantes Buttes. There was Ceniza Mesa-twenty miles away, a table-topped mass of stone rising out of an ocean of ragged erosion like an immense aircraft carrier. Eons ago the mesa had been part of the Lukachukai plateau. It was still moored to the mountain ramparts by a sway-backed saddle ridge. It was on that saddle ridge that Billy Nez had seen the Big Navajo working and it was there Leaphorn would prove his theory. Perhaps Billy Nez had lied. Leaphorn thought about it. Billy Nez hadn't lied.

He pulled the carryall back on the pavement and drove down the slope toward Round Rock, enjoying the beauty of the view. For the first time since the body of Luis Horseman had been found he felt at peace with himself. He switched on the radio. "Ha at isshq nilj?" the broadcast voice demanded. "What clan are you? Are you in the Jesus clan?" Navajo with a Texas accent. A radio preacher from Gallup. Leaphorn pushed the button. Country music from Cortez. He snapped off the radio.

"He stirs, he stirs, he stirs, he stirs," Leaphorn sang.

"Among the lands of dawning, he stirs, he stirs.

The pollen Of dawning, he stirs, he stirs.

Now in old age wandering, he stirs, he stirs.

Now on the trail of beauty, he stirs, Talking God, he stirs…"

The mood lasted past Round Rock, past the turnoff at Seklagaidesi, down eleven jolting miles of ungraded wagon track. Leaphorn still sang the endless ritual verses from the Night Way as he unloaded the horse where the track dead-ended at an abandoned death hogan. He trotted the animal across the broken, empty landscape, skirting Toh-Chin-Lini Butte, moving southeastward toward the Ceniza saddle. He saw the bones of a sheep, the empty burrows of a prairie-dog town, and the moving shadow of a Cooper's hawk swinging in the sky above him. He saw no tire tracks and he expected to see none. That would have been luck. Leaphorn never counted on luck. Instead he expected order-the natural sequence of behavior, the cause producing the natural effect, the human behaving in the way it was natural for him to behave. He counted on that and upon his own ability to sort out the chaos of observed facts and find in them this natural order. Leaphorn knew from experience that he was unusually adept at this. As a policeman, he found it to be talent which saved him a great deal of labor. It was a talent which, when it worked unusually well, caused him a faint subconscious uneasiness, grating on his ingrained Navajo conviction that any divergence from the human norm was unnatural and-therefore-unhealthy. And it was a talent which caused him, when the facts refused to fall into the pattern demanded by nature and the Navajo Way, acute mental discomfort.

He had felt that discomfort ever since Horseman had turned up dead-contrary to nature and Leaphorn's logic-far from the place where nature and logic insisted he should be. But as he led his borrowed horse the last steep yards to the crest of the Ceniza saddle the discomfort was gone. The top of the ridge was narrow. In a very few moments he would find tire tracks and the tracks would match the tread pattern drawn for him by Billy Nez. Of that Leaphorn was certain. When he examined these tracks he would find the Land-Rover had driven up the saddle to the mesa top empty and had come down with a heavy weight on its rear tires. And then the irritatingly chaotic affair of Luis Horseman would be basically orderly, with only a few minor puzzles to solve.

The narrow ridge offered few choices of paths, even for a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and Leaphorn found the tire tracks quickly. There were four sets instead of the two he had expected to find, indicating two trips up and two trips down. He made no attempt to find meaning in that. He concentrated on the fresher tracks, establishing by the traction direction which of them had been made going up the slope. In an area where the soil was soft he checked the depth of the tire marks. Exactly as he had expected. On the trip down, the rear tires had cut almost a half-inch deeper.

Behind him the horse snorted and stamped, fighting off the flies.

"Horse," Leaphorn said, "it comes out just the way we figured it would."

Leaphorn rose from his squat and brushed a fly from the horse's back. There was no trace left of the nagging sense of wrongness and urgency that had dogged him for days, none of that vague, undefined feeling that something unnatural and evil was afoot in his territory. He understood now. It was a good feeling.

And then Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn took two short steps across the small place of soft, loamy earth and looked down at the older tracks. He recorded the fact that they had been dimmed by at least one rain shower. He noticed that this set, too, varied in the depth the rear tires had cut. It had taken, Leaphorn thought at first, two trips to haul down the remains of the shattered rocket. A split second later his mind processed what his eyes were seeing. On this round trip, the Land-Rover had carried its heavy load on the way up-not on the way down.

The Navajo language is too specific and precise to lend itself to effective profanity. Leaphorn cursed in Spanish and then-at length-in English.

It took Leaphorn almost three hours to piece together as much as he could of what had happened on this ridge and on the mesa to which it led. He worked methodically and carefully, resisting an urge to hurry. And when he put it all together, he had nothing but another enigma which offered no possibility of solution.

To Leaphorn's surprise the Land-Rover had approached the saddle from the southeast, emerging from the Chinle Desert from the direction of the Lukachukai ramparts. On the first trip up-perhaps as long as a month earlier-it had carried a heavy load over its rear axle. At several places the driver had stopped to cut brush out of the way, sometimes using an ax and sometimes a power chain saw. To traverse the steepest slope, where the saddle rose sharply to the lip of the mesa rim-rock, he had used a winch line in several places to help pull the vehicle up. Once on top, the vehicle had driven fairly directly about a mile across the mesa. There something heavy and metallic had been unloaded on a flat outcropping of sandstone, scoring the soft rock. From this point, the Land-Rover had made a backing turn and driven directly back over the original track.

Even though the other tracks were weeks fresher, he had spent most of the time sorting out the second trip. He finally concluded that on this trip the Land-Rover had driven directly to the sandstone outcropping. Then it had returned to the rim where the saddle joined the mesa. There several small trees had been cut and a score of boulders moved, apparently to clear a better roadway. At the site of this heavy work, Leaphorn found the tracks of Billy Nez's rubber-soled sneakers, marks of the Big Navajo's flat-heeled boots, a bread wrapper, and an empty Vienna sausage can. After Billy Nez had been here-and presumably after he had left with the Big Navajo's stolen hat-the Land-Rover had driven back over the rim and back to the sandstone. There the heavy object had been reloaded and the Land-Rover had driven down off the mesa. This much was clear. Leaphorn had found three ponderosa poles used as a tripod, which must have supported the pulley used to lift whatever it was the Big Navajo had unloaded and then reloaded.

Leaphorn rubbed his fingertips over his forehead, trying to recreate exactly what the Big Navajo had done on that second visit to the Ceniza Mesa.

He had first driven to the heavy object. And what then? Looked at it? Assured himself it was still there? Adjusted it? Fed it? Put fuel in it? Turned it off? Or on? No hope of guessing. And then the Big Navajo had driven back to the rim to improve the steep approach. Why? If he could winch the loaded Land-Rover up the slope he could winch it down, given enough time. Was that it? Time? Did he expect to be in a hurry coming down? Maybe, Leaphorn thought. Maybe that was it. Time. But Navajos didn't hurry. In fact, there was no word in the Navajo language for time.

And then the Big Navajo had discovered his hat had been stolen, had found the tracks of Billy Nez, and knew someone had watched him. Knowing this, he had driven back over the top, reloaded the heavy object, and hauled it down off the mesa. Why? Maybe because Billy Nez might find it. But where had the big man taken it? And what was it?

Leaphorn stood on the mesa rimrock and stared out across the Chinle at the Lukachukai slopes. The sun was down now. The tops of the evening thunderheads over the mountains were still a dazzling sunlit white, but below the fifteen thousand-foot level they turned abruptly dark blue with shadow of oncoming night. The desert was streaked with pink, red, and purple now, the reflected afterglow from cloud formations to the west. Normally Leaphorn would have been struck by the immensity of this beauty. Now he hardly noticed it. He stared at the darkening line of the Lukachukai ramparts, searching out the points of blackness, the open mouths of the canyons which drained it. Since the Land-Rover had come from the southeast, across the Chinle, it must have come from one of these. He could backtrack it. Twenty miles, he guessed. Maybe twenty-five, and a lot of it would be over bare slick rock. Even in daylight he wouldn't average a mile an hour. At night it would be impossible.

A burrowing owl, its wings stiff, planed up from the desert below him, banked into the invisible elevator of air rising up the mesa wall. It hung on the current a few feet below him-its yellow eyes examining the rimrock for incautious rodents feeding early. Leaphorn envied its mobility. Since the moment he had seen his orderly, logical explanation of Luis Horseman's death demolished by the hard facts of the Land-Rover's tire tracks, the old sense of urgency had returned. He had resisted it by sheer strength of will, forcing himself to concentrate on deciphering what had happened at this mesa. Now he resisted no longer. Instead, he thought about it-turning this itching impulse to hurry in his mind. What was it that bothered him?

He laughed, and the owl, making a second and slightly higher sweep over the mesa wall, panicked at the sound. It flapped past him, trailing its chittering quick-quick-quick-quick call, and vanished in the shadows.

Everything was bothering him, Leaphorn thought. Nothing fit. Everything was irrational. But why this sense of time running out, of something dangerous?

Leaphorn lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, thinking hard. Luis Horseman had been killed. Billy Nez had found the tracks of the Big Navajo's Land-Rover near where Horseman had hidden. A Navajo had been killed and a Navajo had killed him-that was the presumption. Leaphorn studied this presumption, again seeking an answer to the central question. Why? Why did Navajos kill? Not as lightly as white men, because the Navajo Way made life the ultimate value and death unrelieved terror. Usually the motive for homicide on the Reservation was simple. Anger, or fear, or a mixture of both. Or a mixture of one with alcohol. Navajos did not kill with cold-blooded premeditation. Nor did they kill for profit. To do so violated the scale of values of The People. Beyond meeting simple immediate needs, the Navajo Way placed little worth on property. In fact, being richer than one's clansmen carried with it a social stigma. It was unnatural, and therefore suspicious. From far behind him on the mesa came the voice of the owl. Ta-whoo, it said. Whoo.

Where, then, was the motive? There was something about all this that seemed strangely un-Navajo. But the big man who drove the Land-Rover was one of The People. Leaphorn was sure of that, remembering the face in Shoemaker's. There had been times at first at Arizona State when Leaphorn had trouble with the faces of white men. He had noticed only the roundness of their eyes and their paleness and all Belacani had looked alike to him. But he had no trouble with the faces of the Dinee. The Big Man had the face and the frame of a Tuba City Navajo-heavy-boned without the delicacy and softness added by the Pueblo blood mixture. And he wore braids. The trademark of the man who held to the Navajo Way. But why were the braids so short?

Leaphorn thought about that for a moment. And abruptly he again had an answer. Not all of it. But enough to make him urge the horse down the ridgeline much faster than the tired animal wanted to move. Enough to tell him that Billy Nez, hunting his witch in the Lukachukai canyons, might actually find one to his mortal danger. Enough to tell him that he must be at the hogan of Charley Nez at dawn. There he would pick up the boy's trail. The unshod horse should be easy to follow.

Mars rose over the black outline of Toh-Chin-Lini Butte as he loped across the Chinle breaks, his mood matching the gathering darkness. He was remembering his words to the Big Navajo at Shoemaker's-the casual words which he now was sure had caused Luis Horseman to die.

Chapter 16

Bergen McKee had been dreaming. He stood detached from himself, watching his figure moving slowly across a frozen lake, knowing with the dreamer's omniscience that there was no water under the ice-only emptiness-and dreading the nightmare plunge which would inevitably come. And then the raucous cawing of the ravens mixed with the dream and broke it and suddenly he was awake.

He sat motionless for a second, perplexed by the dim light and the blank wall before him. Then full consciousness flooded back and with it the awareness that he was sitting, cold and stiff, on the dusty floor of a room in the Anasazi cliff dwelling.

McKee pushed his back up against the wall and looked at Ellen Leon, lying limply opposite him, face to the wall, breathing evenly in her sleep. He looked at his watch. It was almost five, which meant he had slept about six hours and that it would soon be full dawn on the mesa above the canyon. With that thought came a quick sense of urgency.

He looked at his hand, tightly wrapped now in bandage, and then glanced quickly around the room. The enclosure was much too large for living quarters. It had been built either as a communal meeting place for one of the pueblo's warrior secret societies or as a storeroom for grain-three stone walls built out from the face of the cliff and, like the cliff, sloping slightly inward at the top.. The only way out was the way they had come in-through a crawl hole in the roof where the wall joined the cliff. And there was no way to reach the hole without the ladder-the ladder which the Big Navajo had carefully withdrawn after leaving them here.

Outside, a raven cawed again and then there was silence. McKee leaned against the wall and tried to sort it out.

Whatever was happening here was the product of meticulous planning. That was clear. Behind the brush at the foot of the cliff there had been four sections of aluminum-alloy ladder. The man called Eddie had fit them quickly together, fastened them with bolts and wing nuts, and they reached exactly from a massive sandstone block at the top of the talus slope to this shelf. If the ladder was not custom-built for the purpose, at least the bolt holes had been drilled with this cliff dwelling in mind.

And, when they had reached the top, Eddie had pulled up the ladder, and laid it carefully out of sight. The action obviously had long since become habit. It would leave anyone passing below no hint that this cleft was occupied. It was equally obvious that the peculiar hide-out had been occupied for weeks. Behind a screen of bushes which grew back from the ledge under the overhanging cliff there was all the equipment for a permanent camp-a two-burner kerosene stove, a half-dozen five-gallon cans and a tarp stretched low to the ground protecting cartons and boxes. And there had been two bedrolls. Whoever else was involved must sleep somewhere else, perhaps directing this operation from somewhere outside. From what Eddie had said, others would tell them when they could leave.

And whoever they were, they had a radio transmitter. After Eddie had fished cans of meat and beans from under the tarp and fed them and started him soaking his hand in a pot of steaming water, the Big Navajo had climbed back down the ladder. He had sat for a long time in the Land-Rover and when he returned he had news.

McKee rubbed his knuckles across his forehead, remembering exactly. The big man had been grinning when he walked up to where Eddie was sitting-grinning broadly.

"Girlie says maybe tomorrow afternoon will do it," the Navajo had said. Eddie had looked pleased, but he had said something noncommittal. Something like Girlie's been wrong before. No. It was Girlie's been wrong three times, because the Indian had laughed then and said, "Fourth time's the charm for us. It had occurred to McKee then that if these men were leaving tomorrow they would no longer need a letter written by him: Once they had finished what they had come to do and had left this canyon why would it matter if someone came looking for Canfield and Miss Leon and himself? It would only matter that no one be left alive to describe them. Thinking that, he had decided to throw the water pot at the Big Navajo and jump Eddie, trying for Eddie's pistol. He hadn't thought he would get the pistol, but there would be nothing to lose in trying. And then the Navajo had baffled him again.

"Dr. McKee," he had said, "I think we'd better try to get that knuckle of yours back into joint, and tie it up with a splint. I'm going to be busy tomorrow, but by tomorrow night I'll want to get that writing done."

Thinking about it now, McKee was still puzzled. Eddie had carried a section of the ladder to the cliff ruin and they had climbed against the overhang to the top of this wall… and then down into the pitch darkness of this room. The Navajo had told him to sit on the floor and hold out his hand. He had argued with the Indian that the joint was broken, not just dislocated.

The Navajo had laughed. "They feel like that when they're pulled out, but we can get it back in the socket."

The big man had squatted beside him, with Eddie holding the flashlight from above, and had taken McKee's swollen right hand in both of his own, and suddenly there had been pain beyond endurance. When he had returned to awareness, Miss Leon was holding his head and his hand was tightly wrapped. He had been sick then, violently sick, and then they had talked.

"Where did they go?" McKee had asked. It was almost totally dark in the windowless room, with only a small spot of moonlight reflecting through the roof hole relieving the blackness.

"I heard them a little while ago," Miss Leon had said. "I think they were both out there where their sleeping rolls are. And then I heard what sounded like the ladder being moved."

"I guess they climbed down," McKee said.

There was a long silence. McKee felt her shoe against his leg. The touch seemed somehow personal, and intimate, and comforting.

"Dr. McKee." Her voice was very small. "I didn't hear all of what you and that Navajo said when we were at Dr. Canfield's camper. Dr. Canfield's body was in there, wasn't it? He killed Dr. Canfield?"

"Yes," McKee said. There was no use trying to lie to her. "I guess he did."

"Then he'll kill us, too," she said.

"No," McKee said. "We'll find a way out." He could think of no possible way.

"There isn't any way out," Miss Leon said. "It would take a magician to get out of this."

McKee was glad it was dark. Judging from the sound of her voice, she was on the ragged edge of tears.

"I didn't have a chance to tell you," he said. "We think maybe that electrical engineer you were looking for may be working somewhere way up the canyon."

"Jim? Did you find him?"

"Some Indians saw a van truck driving up in here. Do you know if he was pulling a generator?"

"There was a little trailer behind his truck," she said. "Would that be a generator?"

"Probably," McKee said. He searched his mind for some way to keep this conversation going, to keep her from thinking of sudden death.

"I noticed your ring, Miss Leon. Is this Dr. Hall-er, Jim-the one you're engaged to?" i

"Why don't you call me Ellen?" she said. There was a pause. "Yes, I was going to marry him."

McKee noticed the past tense instantly. And then it occurred to him why she used it. She thought she would soon be dead.

"What's he like?" McKee asked. "Tell me about him."

"He's tall," she said. "And rather slim. Blond hair, blue eyes. He's very handsome really. And he's-he's, well-sometimes moody. And sometimes very happy. And always very smart."

The voice stopped. I match none of that, McKee thought, except the mood part.

"He graduated magna cum laude." The voice paused, then continued, "And our society doesn't have the proper respect for magna cum laude."

"I guess not," McKee said.

Ellen laughed. "I was quoting Jim," she said. "Jim is-well, Jim is very ambitious. He wants things. He wants a lot of things, and he's very, very smart-and-and so he'll get them."

"I don't know why," McKee said. "But I guess I never was very ambitious." He wished instantly that he hadn't said it. It sounded self-pitying.

"What else about him?" McKee asked. He didn't enjoy hearing her talk about the man. But it was better for her to talk, better than having her sitting silent in the dark-dreading tomorrow. She talked rapidly now, sounding sometimes as if she had waited a long time for someone to listen, and sometimes as if she was talking only to herself, trying to understand the tale she was telling.

She had met Jim at Pennsylvania State on the first day of a Shakespeare's Tragedies class. He had taken the chair to her left and she had hardly noticed him until the professor called the roll. But the professor's voice had risen slightly in a question as he read "Jimmy Willie Hall" off the class card. The professor had intended no rudeness and he made this clear by nodding in acknowledgment to Jim's "Heah," but someone in the back of the room had sniggered and this churlishness to a stranger had embarrassed Ellen, embarrassed her all the more because she, too, had smiled at the ludicrous sound. She had glanced at the young man with the outlandish name and noticed he wore cowboy boots and had a wide-brimmed gray felt hat pushed under his chair. On a campus where styles were set by the casual, careless conformity of young men from Philadelphia one was as out of place as the other. And, when she had looked at him again, she had seen that while his face, neck, and hands were incredibly sunburned his forearms about the wrists were as white as the shirt he was wearing.

"He looked very strange and out of place," Ellen said. And suddenly she laughed. "I thought he would be lonely," she said, sounding incredulous.

She had spoken to this Jimmy Willie Hall in the lecture building hallway. Jim had said, in reply to her comment that he wasn't from the East, that he was from Hall, New Mexico, and when she had asked where that was, he had said he wasn't really from Hall, exactly, because their place was twenty one miles northwest of there, in the foothills of the Oscura Mountains. It was just that they picked up their mail at Hall. He guessed he should say he was from Corona, which was larger and slightly closer.

The conversation had been inane and pointless, Ellen recalled, as exploratory chats with strangers tend to be. She asked why, if Corona was larger and nearer, they picked up their mail at Hall, and he had explained that there was no road from the Hall ranch to Corona. To get there you had to go through the Oscura Range and Jicarilla Apache Reservation or over the malpais-across seven miles of broken lava country. You can't even get a horse over that, he had explained. The only time he had tried, his horse had broken a leg and he had been bitten by a rattlesnake.

"That sounds like he was trying to impress me," she said. "But he wasn't. A girl can tell about that. He was just telling me about a silly mistake he had made." Ellen's voice stopped. "I guess I knew right then he wasn't lonely," she continued, thoughtfully, "and that I had never seen anyone like him."

He had seemed, she remembered, like someone visiting from the far side of the globe her father kept in the office of his pharmacy-someone completely foreign to all she knew. As different from the men she had dated as his empty Oscura foothills were from her family's elm-shaded residential street in a Philadelphia suburb.

"You remember Othello"?" Ellen asked suddenly.

"Othello?" McKee said, surprised.

"Yes. The Moor of Venice. We studied it that semester, after Hamlet. You remember how Desdemona was fascinated by Othello?"

"I remember," McKee said, trying to remember.

"That was us," Ellen said. "That was our private joke."

"Remember how it goes?" She paused a moment.

"A maiden never bold;

Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion

Blush'd at herself; and she-in spite of nature,

Of years, of country, credit, everything-

To fall in love with what she fear'd to look on!

It is a judgment maim'd and most imperfect…"

"Yes," said McKee, "I remember it." He felt immensely sad.

"I would say that," Ellen said, "and Jim would say Othello's lines:

"It was my hint to speak-such was the process;

And of the Cannibals that each other eat.

The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear

Would Desdemona seriously incline…'"

Ellen stopped again. And when she continued the voice was shaky.

"I loved him for the dangers he had passed.

And he loved me that I did pity them."

McKee reached across the darkness and found her hand. "It's going to be all right," he said. "We'll get out of here and find him."

"Can't you understand?" she asked, and her voice sounded angry now. "Why should I pity someone like Jim Hall? Why should anyone pity anybody who has everything?"

McKee couldn't think of an answer.

"Because he doesn't know he has everything?" Ellen suggested. "Because he isn't happy?

"Sometimes he is, but mostly he isn't. He's angry. He says he's caught in a system which keeps you on the treadmill. Forty years on the treadmill, he says. He talks about it a lot, about how it takes a million dollars to beat the system, to pay your own ransom, to buy back your own life."

She laughed again, a bitter sound. "I guess he… Well, I guess Jim will make a million dollars," she said.

"Not teaching on an engineering faculty," McKee said.

"Oh, he's not going to do that," she said. "He's going with one of the electronic communications products companies and he's bringing along one of his patents, so it's a very good job."

"Is that what he's working on out here?" McKee asked. "Trying it out."

"Oh, no. This is another one, I think. I-well, I wish I understood it better. Something to do with very narrow-range sound transmission. He explained it to me-quite often-but I don't really understand it."

McKee started to ask her why she was looking for Dr. Hall and bit back the question. The answer was obvious, and none of his business. A woman who loves a man would simply want to see him.

"Dr. Canfield was nice, he was nice, a nice man," Ellen said. "But he was too polite to ask why I was chasing after Jim. And you've been nice, too. But would you like to know?"

"It's your private business," McKee said. "No, I don't want to know."

"I want to tell you. I have to tell someone," she said. "I came because I wanted to tell Jim-to tell him that I think he's wrong, and he's going to have to make a choice. He's got to quit wanting a million dollars. He has to. I've come all the way out here. He has to understand."

It sounded utterly feminine to McKee, the reverse side of Sara's logic, and a simpler assignment. A brilliant, ambitious man could easily enough fail to make a fortune. But how could a Bergen McKee, a natural on the treadmill, make himself rich?

And, thinking that, McKee, after forty hours without rest, was suddenly asleep.

Now he was fully awake again. He pushed himself to his feet and surveyed the room. The floor was covered with a heavy deposit of dust. He could feel it, flourlike, under the soles of his shoes. But the condition of the room was surprising. It was virtually intact. The roof sagged only at one corner, where the ceiling beams had snapped with rot, and plaster still clung to most of the lower portion of the walls.

McKee flaked off a section of plaster with his thumbnail, broke it and examined it. Inside it was almost black-a mixture of animal blood and caliche clay used by the pueblo-building people.

It was stone-hard and would last for centuries, and so would the cedar poles in the roof when protected from weather under a cliff. But not for this many centuries. Left alone, the roof would have crumbled long ago and the top of the walls would have fallen inward. This ruin must have been partially rebuilt-restored by one of the later pueblo people who used the canyon before the Navajos arrived and drove them out.

It was then he saw the face. He stood for a moment staring at it, putting together what it meant, feeling a sense of excitement building within him. The face was drawn on the plaster in something yellow-probably ocher. It was faded now and partly missing where chips of plaster had fallen away. A roundish outline with a topknot, long ears, and a collar. The figure was unquestionably a Hopi Kachina-either the Dung Carrier or the Mud Head Clown. And below it to the right were two more stylized outlines.

From the Hopi mythology McKee recognized Chowilawu, the spirit of Terrible Power, with four black-tipped feathers rising vertically from his squarish head and a horizontal band of red bunding his eyes. The third head had been almost erased by flaking. Only the dim outline of a protruding ear and the double vertical cheek stripes signifying a warrior spirit remained. Down the wall there were other markings-the zigzag of lightning, bird tracks, the stair-stepped triangles of clouds, and a row of phallic symbols. Undoubtedly, one of the Hopi clans had used this as a ceremonial kiva.

He stood absolutely silent a moment, thinking, and then squatted beside Miss Leon and put his hand on her shoulder.

Time to wake up."

She rubbed her arm across her eyes.

"Very domestic," McKee said.

She looked up at him and then pushed herself up against the wall, trying to straighten her tousled hair with her fingers. "Oh. What time is it?"

"About four forty-five," McKee said. "We shouldn't have wasted all that time. We need to get out of here."

"Out of here? But I don't see how we can." Miss Leon looked up at the exit hole in the roof and then at McKee. "What do you mean? How can we?"

"The Hopis lived in this. They rebuilt it. Have you read anything about how the Hopis build their pueblos?" It occurred to McKee as he said it that he was showing off and the thought embarrassed him. Ellen looked puzzled.

"They always built an escape hatch at the bottom of a wall," he explained. "A hole into the next room, and then they would fill it in with rocks that could be easily pulled out. Kept them from being penned up in part of the structure if they were under attack."

"Oh," Ellen said. "You think there's a way out, then."

"I think so. We can find out. It would be in one of the inside corners."

And most likely, McKee thought, in the corner adjoining the cliff. Bracing over the escape hole would have been easier there.

The corner was littered with broken cedar sticks. Above, occasional moisture seeping down the cliff face had accelerated the slow work of decay. The builders had cut holes into the soft stone to support the ends of ceiling beams and here the rot had started first.

McKee selected one of the sticks and began pushing the debris away from the corner. He worked carefully, trying to avoid noise. But the powdery dust rose in a cloud around him. Ellen knelt beside him, pushing the dust back carefully with her hands.

"Don't make any noise."

"Do you have any idea what this is all about?" she whispered. "Why does he want you to write that letter?"

"I don't know what's going on," McKee said. "Maybe they're crazy."

"I think you know about the letter," Miss Leon said. She stopped digging and looked at him. Her face was chalky with dust. White and strained. McKee looked away.

"He explained why he wanted the letter," McKee said.

"And if you believed him, you would have written it," Ellen said. She sat back on her heels, still looking at him. "Why don't you stop treating me like a child? You know as well as I do that if they were going to turn us loose they wouldn't need the letter."

"O.K.," McKee said. "I think you're right. They want the letter because they know that someday there's going to be a search started for us and they don't want the search to be in here. They don't want the search to be in this canyon ever-or at least not for a long, long time."

"But why not? Do you know why?"

"No," McKee said. "Can't even make a good guess at it. But it has to be right."

He leaned back against the cliff and wiped the dust off his face.

"I didn't think so at first. I thought that, whatever they were doing here, it was making them wait for something, and they didn't know how long the wait would be, so they didn't want interference. But that's not right, because it seems to be happening today. They could just leave us here, and it would be a long time before anyone found us. A lot more time than they would need to get away."

That's what I thought of, too," Ellen said.

"Did you notice how they camped?" McKee asked. "No garbage hole. Put all the cans and stuff in gunny sacks. And Eddie, when he lit the stove, he put the burned match in his vest pocket."

"I didn't notice. I guess I didn't think of that."

"When they pull out of here there won't be any traces left. Not after the August rainy season, anyway. Unless there was some reason for a search, no one could ever know anyone had been in here."

Beneath the pile of debris in the corner, the plaster looked almost new. He jabbed it with his stick and cursed inwardly when the rotten wood snapped. For this he needed his pocket knife and the Big Navajo had taken it when he had searched him. Or had he?

McKee suddenly was aware of the weight of the knife in his shirt pocket. He had dropped it there with his cigarette pack when he hurried from their tent-hands full of odds and ends-in his futile race to escape. It was a ridiculous place to carry a pocket knife, and the Navajo had overlooked it.

McKee fished it out and pulled open the blade-noticing he could hold it between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand with little pain. With the knuckle back in joint the swelling must be going down. There would be no chance now of persuading the Navajo that he couldn't write.

The plaster chipped away in sections, revealing a rough surface of stone with mud mortar chinking. A moment later a yard-square sheet crumbled and McKee saw he had guessed right. The fitted stonework ended in a crude half-arch in the corner two feet above the floor. The first stone he pulled on was jammed tightly, but the second slipped out easily.

McKee rocked back on his heels, looking at the stone. It was about the size of a grapefruit and felt clumsy in his left hand. He tried to shift it to the right, but it fell into the dust.

Miss Leon looked at the stone and then at him.

"I think we can get out," he said. "We can if the room on the other side hasn't fallen in and buried this crawl hole under a lot of big rocks."

"What do we do if we get out?" Her voice was very small.

"Did you hear them come back during the night?" McKee said.

"No. I didn't hear anything. But we don't even know if they left. Maybe just one climbed down."

The Big Navajo said he had to leave," McKee said. "And he said he might not be back until tonight. If Eddie didn't stay up here on the ledge, we'll try to find a way off."

Miss Leon looked skeptical.

"Come on," McKee said. "The Hopis lived here long enough to rebuild part of this place and they didn't like being in places where they could be boxed in. There's a good enough chance that they had some sort of escape route off the cliff. They always had a hidden way out if they could."

There was another alternative. If they found no way off the cliff, he could try to keep Eddie and the Indian from climbing back up. He might surprise them, catch them on the ladder-defenseless from a rock dropped from above. With surprise it might work. But there was a rifle in the Land-Rover. They would be good with it-probably very good.

"But what if Eddie stayed up here?" Ellen said. "I'll bet he did."

"I don't know," McKee said. "Just let's hope he didn't."

He tried to make his grin reassuring without much success. He was thinking of the way Eddie handled the pistol. For the first time it occurred to him exactly what his problem might be. He might have to find a way to kill a man. He turned away from the thought.

Outside the hole he stood tensely, listening. The ravens had flown away now and the only sound was the morning wind and the faint whistling of a horned lark on the canyon rim high above him. The Hopis had repaired this room, too. He could tell from the remnants of plaster. But a slab of stone had fallen from the cliff, crashing through the roof and tumbling much of the east wall outward. Denied this support and protection, the roof had collapsed and centuries of wind had drifted a hump of sand and dust against what remained of the wall. Over this hump, McKee surveyed what he could see of the east end of the ruins.

The shelf gradually narrowed to the east. From what he remembered seeing yesterday from the canyon bottom, this entire east end was filled with ruined walls, ending just short of the point where a structural fault split the canyon wall from floor to rim. That would be the place to look for an escape route. That narrow chimney would be the only possible way up. The thought of it made his stomach knot. As a graduate student, he had climbed down such a slot to reach a cliff house at Mesa Verde, and the memory of it was an unpleasant mixture of fear and vertigo.

He climbed cautiously over the rubble of the exterior wall at the edge of the shelf and looked down into the canyon. The Land-Rover was not in sight. That should mean the Navajo had not returned from wherever his business had taken him. Nor was there any sign of Eddie. That meant nothing. Eddie might be sleeping below him in any of a thousand invisible places. Or Eddie might be only a few yards away on the cliff.

Here the Anasazis had crowded their building almost to the edge of the cliff, leaving along the lip of the precipice a narrow walkway, which was now buried under debris. McKee moved along it gingerly, keeping as close as the fallen rocks would allow to the wall of the storeroom. At the corner, behind a water-starved growth of juniper, he stopped.

When he looked around the corner, Eddie would be standing there. Eddie would have the pistol in his hand and would-without any change of expression-shoot him in the head. McKee thought about it for a moment. Eddie might look faintly apologetic, as he had when he had introduced himself at the Land-Rover. But he would pull the trigger.

McKee stood with his back pressed against the stones and looked out across the canyon. It was almost full dawn now. Light from the sun, barely below the horizon, reflected a reddish light from a cloud formation somewhere to the east onto the tops of the opposite cliffs. A piñon jay exploded out of a juniper across the canyon in a flurry of black and white. He heard the ravens again, far up the canyon now. It was a beautiful morning.

McKee leaned forward and looked around the wall.

Eddie was not in sight. The stretched tarp was there, and the stove, and other equipment. Both sleeping bags were gone. So was the ladder. McKee felt himself relaxing. Eddie must have climbed down and left them alone on the shelf.

McKee was suddenly aware that he would be plainly visible from below. He moved back behind the juniper and stood, thinking it through. He glanced at his watch. Five A.M. Then he heard Eddie whistling.

Eddie walked around the jumble of fallen rock at the west end of the shelf, not fifty feet away. He was carrying his bedroll under his right arm and his coat slung over his left shoulder-whistling something that sounded familiar. He dumped the bedroll, folded the coat neatly across an outcrop of sandstone, and squatted beside the stove.

McKee stared numbly through the juniper. Of course the Big Navajo had left nothing at all to luck. He had taken the ladder but left the guard behind.

Eddie was combing his hair. His shoulder holster, with the pistol in it, was strapped over his vest. About twenty yards away, McKee guessed. He could cover maybe ten yards before Eddie saw him, and another five before Eddie could get the pistol out, and then Eddie would shoot him as many times as were necessary.

The first plan McKee considered as he worked his way slowly back along the cliff edge involved waiting in ambush at the corner of the storeroom until Eddie mounted the ladder to bring them their breakfast. He imagined himself sprinting the fifteen feet before Eddie, encumbered with food, could draw the pistol, knocking the ladder from under him and triumphantly disarming him.

It might work-if Eddie brought them breakfast. There was no reason to believe he would. Much more likely he would first check on his prisoners with pistol in hand.

The second plan, even more fleeting, involved having Miss Leon raise a clamor-perhaps shouting that he was sick. This would probably bring Eddie up the ladder to look in the hole in the storehouse roof. But he would come cautiously and suspiciously. The third plan survived a little longer because-if it worked-it did not involve facing Eddie's pistol. He and Miss Leon would work their way-unmissed and unheard-to the east end of the shelf. There they would find the Hopi escape route in the chimney and would climb to freedom. It was a pleasant idea and utterly impractical. It was far from likely that Ellen could make the climb and impossible for anyone to make it without noise. McKee considered for a moment how it would feel to be hanging on handholds a hundred feet up the chimney with Eddie standing below aiming at him. He hurriedly considered other possibilities.

One involved finding a hiding place back in the ruins and waiting in ambush, rock in hand, for Eddie to come hunting for him. The flaw in this one was easy to see. There would be no reason for Eddie to hunt. He would simply wait for the Navajo to return, believing there was no way off the cliff.

It would be necessary to make Eddie come after him.

McKee dropped on his stomach at the crawl hole.

"I'm right here," Ellen whispered. "I heard him whistling. Did he see you?"

"No," McKee said. "He's cooking breakfast."

"You know what," Ellen said. "I said it would take a magician to get out of this room. You're a magician."

"Um-m. Look-make sure your watch is wound," McKee said. "I want you to wait thirty minutes and then come out here and make some sort of noise. Knock a rock off the wall or some thing to attract him. But don't run. Don't give him any reason to shoot."

"What are you going to do?" Her whisper was so faint he could hardly hear it.

"Remember. When he comes, give up right away. Put your hands up. And tell him I'm climbing up the escapeway back where the cliff is split at the east end of the ruins. Tell him I'm going for the police."

"Is there really a place you can climb out?"

"I don't know yet," McKee said. "The idea is to get the jump on him."

"There isn't any place. He's going to kill you." She made it a flat statement.

If Ellen said anything else, McKee didn't hear it.

"Ellen," he whispered. "Do you understand what to do?"

"Yes. I guess I do. But is thirty minutes enough?"

McKee thought about it. Every minute that passed might bring Eddie checking. Or it might bring the Big Navajo back. He was suddenly acutely conscious that he was probably setting the time limit on his life.

"I think thirty minutes," he said.

It was eight minutes more than Eddie allowed him.

It had taken very little time to defeat his hopes that the ruins would offer a point of ambush. Along the narrow pathway which followed the lip of the shelf, the walls were too crumbled to provide a place of concealment from which he could attack. Under the cliff itself the ruins were better preserved-some still standing in two stories-but they offered only a hiding place, no place from which to launch an attack. At the end of the shelf, where a massive geologic fault had shifted the earth's crust eons ago and split the cliff, there was no effective cover at all. McKee edged his way carefully past the dwelling's final crumbled corner.

Here the path was buried under tumbled stones. A misstep meant a plunge into the crevasse left by the fault.

McKee looked at his watch. He had used thirteen minutes and accomplished nothing. Here at its mouth the crevasse was about fifteen feet across. Beyond it the shelf continued. It was slightly lower and after a few yards tapered away to nothing.

From where he stood it was impossible to see what the crevasse in the cliff offered. The Anasazis had built their structure to the very base of the cliff wall. The exterior wall had fallen outward over the precipice, but the spreading limbs of piñon screened the narrow opening.

He moved carefully over what remained of partition walls, pausing once to look down into the crack. The split was sheer, and although the narrow slot was partly filled with broken slabs of rock flaked off the walls above, it was much too far to jump.

McKee hurt his hand again climbing what remained of the back wall. He had forgotten the finger for a moment in the overpowering need to know if the crevasse held some possibility for him, and had shifted his weight to it. He was still sick with the pain when he lowered himself into the darkness behind the wall. A minute ticked away as he sat in the dust, holding his hand stiffly in front of him, letting the throbbing diminish and his eyes adjust to the darkness. What he saw both disappointed and encouraged him.

There was no natural pathway into the crevasse as he had hoped. The shelf did not extend into it. But the Anasazis had cut foot and hand holds into the sandstone, making it possible for a person to work his way back into the slot. Somewhere back in the darkness where the crack narrowed, where a man could brace himself between the opposing walls, there would be a way to the top. If he could dispose of Eddie, he could make it. But what about Eddie?

McKee studied his position. There were two ways into this dark cul-de-sac where he now sat between wall and crevasse-over the crumbled wall as he had come, or by pushing past the out-thrusting branches of the piñon. Eddie would probably come over the wall for exactly the same reason he had done so. The piñon had angled outward toward the sunlight. One could force his way past it, but bending by the heavy branches would require a tightrope walk along the very lip of the crevasse. Not knowing where McKee would be, Eddie wasn't likely to risk that. He would choose the wall.

McKee thought about it. If Eddie came over the wall fast-moving from the bright morning light on the shelf into this darkness-then there would be a chance. But that wasn't likely to happen. Eddie would be taking no risks. He would climb the tumbled rocks of the wall slowly, pistol ready. He would pause at the top, studying the gloom. And, if he did, McKee would be a mouse in a trap.

He tested the extending main branch of the piñon. If he could pull it back enough and tie it to something, the route past the tree would be inviting. He could use his shirt as a rope, and tie one end well out on the branch. By putting his full weight against it, he could bend the tree well back from the lip of the cliff-opening an easy walkway. But where could he tie it?

A second after the ideas came to him, he heard Ellen.

Her voice was high, almost hysterical. He heard Eddie, an angry sound, and Ellen again-shouting now. And then the shot. A single crack of noise which released a rumble of echoes to bounce up and down the canyon.

"And now she is dead," McKee thought. "Canfield is dead and she is dead."

He bit the corner of the khaki shirt collar between his front teeth, pulled it taut with his left hand and split it gingerly with the knife. The pain was there when he held the knife, but he could tolerate it. He ripped the shirt down the back, twisted the two sections, and knotted them to his makeshift rope. Then he pulled out his belt and looped it around an outcrop of stone beside the wall.

Now it would reach. He pulled against the tree, thinking numbly that Eddie had not given him thirty minutes and that Ellen had chosen to shout a warning in the face of Eddie's pistol. He strained against the rope of shirt, pulled it through the looped belt, and wrapped it twice. His right hand was no help with this heavy work and he used his teeth to pull the knot tight. In a moment he would confront Eddie.

He was almost ready. He laid the knife on a rock protruding from the wall, sorted through stones in the dust at his feet and chose one which fit well in his left hand. In a very few minutes it would be over. Eddie would come. If Eddie walked past the tree, he would cut the shirt and the limb would slash at Eddie. And, as he cut the rope, he would come over the wall with the rock. If Eddie had been blinded by the whipping limb, or hurt, or even confused, he would kill Eddie. Either way, it would be over then. McKee thought of that. It was better than thinking of Ellen's voice and the sound of the pistol.

Eddie came almost too soon. McKee settled himself high on the rubble and looked over the top and Eddie was there. He was standing on the pathway at the corner, where the shelf was cut by the crevasse, studying the ruins. McKee shrank back behind the screen of piñon limbs as Eddie turned toward him. The gunman's vest was unbuttoned now and he held the pistol in his right hand, close to the body. The barrel, McKee noticed, always pointed with his eyes, like the flashlight of a man searching in the dark.

McKee felt a pressure in his chest and became aware he was holding his breath. He released it and gripped the rock.

Eddie moved now. He walked directly along the edge of the crevasse, just as McKee had done, stepping carefully over the tumbled partition walls.

Twenty feet away he stopped and stood in a half crouch, studying the tree and the wall.

"McKee," he said, "I had to shoot your woman." Eddie's tone was conversational. He stood for a moment listening-no more than the polite pause for reply.

"Killing you is going to cost me thirty thousand dollars," Eddie said. "It's going to cost George twice that much." He paused again. "Are you going to make me do it?"

McKee found he was holding his breath again. Eddie was examining the wall, making his choice.

McKee looked at the rock in his hand. He turned his body, braced himself, and threw it in a high arching toss up the crevasse. There was a sudden echoing clatter as the stone bounced from wall to wall. Eddie took five quick, almost running, steps down the path and then stopped abruptly just short of the piñon.

McKee held the knife blade against the taut cloth. Eddie looked up along the wall and then squatted, peering past the lower branches of the piñon, so close now that McKee could only see his left shoulder and part of his back.

It happened very quickly then.

Eddie moved swiftly into the gap between tree and crevasse and McKee slashed downward with the knife. He knew even as the rope parted that Eddie had stopped again. He had underestimated the gunman's caution.

Coming over the wall, McKee saw only part of what happened. There was the blast of Eddie's pistol, fired into the swinging mass of the limb. Then the blond man, with lightning reflexes, leaped backward in a spinning crouch-swinging the pistol barrel toward him.

Eddie, suddenly, was no longer there. There was a cry-a sound mixed of surprise and anger and fear-and a crashing thump. Eddie's reflexive leap had carried him off the edge of the cliff into the crevasse.

When McKee first looked into the crevasse he presumed Eddie was dead. The man had apparently struck a sloping slab of sandstone about twenty feet below the shelf, bounced from that against a block-shaped mass of black rock, which jammed the center of the crack, and then fallen another ten feet. He was caught in an awkward jackknifed sitting position between rocks about fifteen feet above the sandy floor of the crevasse. Eddie's pistol lay on the sand, about forty-five feet down. McKee stared at it longingly. It was as unreachable as the moon.

And then he saw Eddie's head move. Eddie was looking up at him. His nose was bleeding, McKee noticed, and he was breathing through his mouth. McKee stared at the man, feeling a mixture of embarrassment and pity.

"I fell off," Eddie said.

"Yeh," McKee said. "When you jumped back from that tree."

He started to say he was sorry, but caught himself.

"Can you get down here to me? I got to have help."

"I don't know," McKee said. "George took the ladder down. You know any other way?"

"I was going to draw forty-five thousand dollars," Eddie said. "They had it written up so I'd get fifteen thousand when they were finished and then thirty thousand if nobody knew about it a year from now. That's why we had to have you write that letter."

The blood from Eddie's nose ran across his chin. He coughed. "I can't feel anything in my arms."

"Who are they?" McKee asked. "What are you doing in here?"

"George was getting more because he made the contract and it was up to him," Eddie said. "After this one, if we got it all, I'd of had almost two hundred thousand dollars saved up." He coughed again. "You don't pay taxes on it."

Eddie's head tilted forward. He seemed to be staring at the rock in front of him. McKee knew he was looking at death. If Eddie had been Navajo, soon his ghost would have been escaping to wander eternally, combining all that was weak, and evil, and unnatural in the man, and leaving behind all that was natural and good. Only the Dinee who died before their first cry at birth, or of a natural old age, escaped this fate and enjoyed simple oblivion. Eddie's ghost would be a greedy one, McKee thought, always coveting material possessions-the Navajo ultimate of unnatural wickedness.

Eddie coughed.

"Eddie, where's George now? How long will it be before he comes back?"

It took Eddie a moment to raise his head. "Today's when they were trying to get it finished. George had to go out and uncover the sets and after that…" Eddie paused to cough again. "Then we were going to pull out of here. One more day for George to clean up and then we'd be finished."

"But when will George be back?"

"I-I don't know," Eddie said.

"Please," McKee said. "I have to know."

"No. It wouldn't help. He works out of Los Angeles, but I heard about him all the way back East. They say he never broke a contract." Eddie coughed again. "Never screwed up a job. He'll kill you and your woman and then he'll go on away."

McKee felt a sudden surge of hope. It lasted only a second.

"Didn't you kill her?"

"Oh," Eddie said. His voice was weak. "I forgot for a minute."

He peered up at McKee, frowning. "Told her not to yell," he said. "Maybe it didn't kill her."

McKee left him talking. He ran, hurdling the crumbled walls, back to where Ellen would be.

She was lying almost out of the crawl hole. She had apparently been emerging on hands and knees when Eddie shot her. McKee stood a long moment looking at her, feeling infinitely lonely and terribly tired. It wasn't until he lifted her that he realized she was still alive.

The bullet had cut through her cheek, deflected past her jawbone, struck the top of her shoulder, and torn out through.the back of her shirt. McKee brought water, canned food, the first-aid kit, and one of the sleeping bags from the campsite. He laid her on the bed roll and examined the wounds. The slug apparently had hit her right shoulder blade, breaking it. It had deflected out through the back muscle, leaving a hole around which a seep of blood was beginning to clot. He rinsed the wounds, powdered them with disinfectant from the kit, bandaged her face, and applied a pad of gauze to the ragged tear where the bullet had finally emerged.

There was nothing else to do. He trotted back to the crevasse. Maybe Eddie could tell him something useful. Eddie was still staring at the rock in front of him, but now Eddie would answer no more questions.

McKee stared down at the body, thinking of what the blond man had told him. The Big Navajo was from Los Angeles. Probably, McKee thought, a "Relocation Navajo"-a child of one of those unfortunate families moved off the drought-stricken Reservation to urban centers during the 1930's. It had been one of the most disastrous experiments of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, turning hungry sheepherders into hungry city alcoholics. If George had been raised in Los Angeles, it would explain his weak command of the Navajo gutturals, and why what he knew of witches came from books. And maybe it would explain an Indian with the underworld connections which Eddie had seemed to imply. But it didn't explain why George and Eddie had been assigned to scare sheepherders out of this canyon country. Or why it was so important that no one learned they had been here.

The metal of Eddie's pistol reflected the early-morning sun. With that, McKee thought, he could simply wait for the Big Navajo to return, shoot him, carry Ellen down the ladder and take her to the hospital in the Land-Rover. But the pistol was beyond recovery. No way down into the crevasse and no way up if he got down.

He thought about it. Without the pistol he could probably keep the Big Navajo off the cliff. There were food and water at the camp. He could wait the big man out. But Ellen would be dying.

McKee chewed on his lip, trying desperately to think of the best solution. It was then he remembered the truck. Old Woman Gray Rocks had said it was parked in Hard Goods Canyon, nine miles up from the mouth of Many Ruins. That must be close-within two miles at the most. He made his decision.

It took him only a few minutes to hide Ellen Leon where the Big Navajo might not be able to find her. He carried her on the sleeping bag back into the ruins under the cuff. He put her in a room, with food and water beside her, and readjusted the bandage on her face. He saw then that her eyes were open.

"Bergen." She held out her hand and he took it-conscious of how small and fragile it felt.

"Lie very still," he said. "I'm going to climb out and get help."

"Bergen," she said again. "Be careful."

He ran back to the fissure in the cliff. He would climb out and find the truck. Somehow he would find the truck. If he didn't it would take a day and a night to walk to Shoemaker's. Eighteen or twenty hours, he guessed, which was about twelve more than he could spare.

He pushed past the piñon tree into the dark fissure, swallowing his dread of the climb. She had said Hall was smart-brilliant. If he could find Jim Hall, maybe Hall would be smart enough to save the girl he was engaged to marry.

Chapter 17

The sun was almost directly overhead when McKee found the wires. He squatted in the thin shade of a juniper and examined them-a cable about the diameter of his finger paralleled by a lighter wire. Both were heavily insulated with gray rubber, almost invisible on the rocky ground. The heavier one, McKee thought, would carry electrical current. The lighter one might be anything, maybe even a telephone wire. They must be part of the data-collection system for Dr. Hall's sound experiments, McKee knew, and they gave him the second hope he had felt since emerging from the chimney three hours earlier.

The first had come an hour ago when he had seen the boy on the horse. He had stopped to catch his breath and make sure of his directions on the plateau. He had glanced behind him, and the boy had been there-not two hundred yards away-silently staring at him. A boy wearing what looked like a red cap. But, when McKee had waved and shouted, the horse and rider had simply disappeared. They had vanished so suddenly that McKee almost doubted his eyes.

"He knows he's in witch country," McKee thought, "and he's spooky." Trying to follow him would be a foredoomed waste of time.

Following the wires, on the other hand, would be simple. At one end there would be some sort of gadget of the sort which concern electrical engineers. At the other end-with any luck at all-he would find the engineer. And Hall would have a truck and maybe a radio transmitter. The cable ran southeast across the plateau toward the Kam Bimghi Valley and northwest back toward the branch canyon McKee had been skirting. It was an easy choice. McKee trotted toward the canyon, following the cable.

At the rim, the cable looped downward, disappearing under brush and reappearing where it was strung across rocky outcrops. McKee paused at the rim, staring up the canyon after the cable.

This branch canyon was much shallower than Many Ruins and its broken walls offered several fairly easy ways down. From the canyon floor, McKee heard an echoing ping, ping, ping-the sound of metal striking metal. A flood of elation erased his weariness. Hall's truck must be there, and Hall with it. And it wasn't more than a quarter of a mile away.

The pain came with absolutely no warning, just as he took a step down off the rimrock. Behind the pain, perhaps a second, he was conscious of the flat snap of a rifle fired a long way off. Then he was conscious only that he was falling and of suffocation-or a terrible need to draw a breath into lungs that wouldn't work. He was on his back now, on a pile of talus just under the rim. The sky in front of his eyes was dark blue. He could breathe again, although inhaling hurt. And he could think again. He put his hand where the pain was, on his right chest. It came away hot and red. Someone had shot him. Who? The boy on the horse? That made no sense. The Big Navajo. Yes, of course.

McKee pushed himself into a sitting position against the rimrock and gingerly examined the damage. He could feel the bullet hole on his back-a small burning spot. It had come out left of his left nipple, tearing a hole through which blood now welled. Broken ribs, he thought, but the lung must have been missed. It still inflated.

McKee coughed and flinched at the knife in his ribs. He tried to think. The Big Navajo must have returned to the cliff, and had found Ellen. No use thinking about it.

From up canyon he heard the dim, puttering sound of a two-cycle engine. Probably a generator motor. And probably down in the canyon bottom Hall hadn't heard the shot. Or if he had heard it would have no reason to be warned by it. He had to reach Hall in time to tell him.

McKee pulled himself to his feet, took three steps along the talus and stopped, gasping, supporting himself by hanging on to the rubber-clad cable strung across the rocks. It would take him half an hour at this rate to reach the truck. And he didn't think he had that much time.

Over the rim he could see nothing at first. An expanse of plateau, sparse clumps of buffalo grass, a scattering of drought-dwarfed piñon, juniper, and creosote bush, a stony surface on which nothing moved. Then he saw, to his left, the figure of a man. The man walked slowly, a rifle with a telescopic sight held across his chest. He moved unhurriedly, relentlessly, inexorably toward the point of rimrock from which McKee had fallen. Five hundred yards away, walking almost casually toward him under a broad-brimmed black hat, was certain death.

McKee fought down a desperate impulse to run. When he conquered the panic he found it replaced by a hard, cold, overpowering anger. He looked around for a weapon and became abruptly conscious of the soft rubber insulation of the cable gripped in his palm.

You son of a bitch. You bastard. You won't just finish me off like a crippled animal. You'll have to come and get me.

Had the Big Navajo been careless, had he simply walked his slow walk directly to the rimrock, McKee would have run out of time. But the Big Navajo took no chances at all. When McKee finally heard his boots, the sound came from below. The hunter was stalking cautiously, skirting the point on the rim where he must have seen McKee knocked down by his bullet, taking his time.

McKee had worked feverishly. He pulled the slack cable over a boulder and slammed it twice with a rock. The cable severed and the end sprang away in a shower of sparks. He stripped five feet of the thick rubber tubing from the dead end with his pocket knife. While he worked, the plan formed in his mind. Just up the canyon, a huge ponderosa had fallen against the rocky cliff-a dead log half obscured by a thick growth of pine saplings. He would crawl into that darkness, tie the rubber to two sapling trunks to make a catapult, cut himself a lance from another sapling, and hope the Big Navajo made a mistake.

The Big Navajo was making no mistakes. McKee could see him now, moving in a half-crouch ten yards below the rimrock. The big man stared upward at the place where McKee's blood smeared the boulder. McKee could see his profile, shaded under the broad rim of the new black hat. It was a handsome face, hawklike and intent. The Big Navajo moved up to the boulder and knelt beside it. He examined the bloody talus debris and then stood, scanned the slope below, and began walking carefully along the route McKee had taken.

McKee pushed his heels deeper into the pine needles,and tested his lance against the tension of the rubber. He had cut a yard-long length of a three-quarter-inch pine stem, given it a crude point, and then hammered the punch tool of his knife into the soft wood six inches from the heavy end. Snapped off, this prong of steel provided the hook on which he had caught the rubber.

He was lying almost flat, his weight pulling against the tough rubber. Down the shaft of the sapling, he saw the Navajo's hat rise into view as he moved slowly up the slope. Then his shoulders, then his belt. The man stopped. He looked at the fallen tree, at the growth of young ponderosa. He stared intently from the sunlight tnto the deep shadows.

McKee held his breath, fought against the dizziness. Four or five steps closer, he prayed. Keep coming. Keep coming.

The Navajo stood, staring directly at him. His face was thoughtful. Suddenly he smiled.

"Well," he said. There you are."

It seemed to McKee to take quite a little time. The Big Navajo's right hand brought the rifle butt smoothly up to the right shoulder, the left hand swung the barrel toward him, the Navajo's face moved slightly to the right, behind the telescopic sight. All this while McKee was releasing the lance.

Most likely the telescope made the difference. Over open sights, the Indian would have seen the lance at the moment of its launch, seen it soon enough to simply step aside. Behind the sight, he saw it too late. There was a sound-which McKee would remember-something like a hammer striking a melon. And the clatter of the rifle falling on the rocks. And the sound of the Big Navajo tumbling backward down the slope.

McKee crawled out of the thicket and picked up the rifle. It seemed incredibly heavy. The Big Navajo had slid, head downward, between two boulders. McKee looked at the man and hastily looked away. The pine shaft had struck him low on the chest. There was no chance at all that he was alive. The black hat lay by the boulder, the sun reflecting off the rich silver of its concho band. And up the slope was a furry bundle tied with a leather thong. McKee untied the thong. A wolf skin unrolled itself.

McKee felt a whirling dizziness. Always wanted a witch's skin. Hang it on my office wall. Maybe give it to Canfield.

He remembered, then, that Canfield was dead, and was conscious that his side was wet and his pant leg was sticking to his thigh. He put the wolf skin over his arm and started down the slope toward the canyon floor. He fell once. But he remembered Ellen Leon and got back to his feet. And finally he was on the sandy canyon floor, where walking was easy.

"Put down the rifle."

"What?" McKee said. A boy was standing behind a clump of willows. There was a horse by him, the reins dragging.

"Put down the rifle." The boy had on a red baseball cap and he had a short-barreled rifle in his hands. An old .30-30. It was pointed at McKee.

McKee dropped the Big Navajo's rifle. The wolf skin fell with it, dropping in a folded hump on the sand.

"Where's the other witch?"

"What?" McKee said. It was important to think about this. "He's dead," he said, after a moment. "He shot me and I killed him. Back up there under the rimrock." McKee pushed the wolf skin with his toes. "This is his witch skin," he said, speaking now in Navajo. "I am not a witch. I am one who teaches in school."

The boy was looking at him, his face expressionless.

"There is a truck a little ways up here," McKee said. "You must let me get to that truck and the man there will help me."

"All right." The boy hesitated, thinking. "You walk. I will walk behind you."

He was within thirty yards of the truck before he saw it-parked in a thicket of tamarisk and willow just off the canyon floor. Beside it a gasoline generator was running. The back door of the van stood open, a padlock dangling in the hasp. Through the doorway McKee heard the faint sound of someone whistling and then of metal tapping on metal.

McKee stopped.

"Hello," he shouted. It didn't sound like his voice.

McKee took two more steps toward the truck, conscious the whistling had stopped.

A man appeared in the doorway of the van, blond, in a denim jacket, taller than McKee and younger, with a hearing aid behind his left ear. His blue eyes rested for a second on McKee, registering surprise and shock.

"What the hell happened?" he said. And then he was out of the truck, coming toward McKee.

"Got shot," McKee said. "Somebody shot me." His voice sounded thick. "Get the bleeding stopped." He sat down abruptly on the sand.

The blond man was saying something.

"Don't talk," McKee said. "Listen. Are you Jim Hall?"

"How did you know that?"

"Listen," McKee said. "Tell this boy here that I'm not a witch and he will help you." He paused now and started again, trying to pronounce the words.

"Ellen Leon was shot, too. Ellen Leon. She's up at that big cliff dwelling in a canyon…" McKee tried to think. "In that canyon that runs into Many Ruins south and west of here."

The man was squatting beside McKee now, his face close. McKee had trouble focusing on the face. The face was surprised, amazed, excited, maybe frightened.

"You said Ellen?" the man said. "What the devil is she doing out here? What happened to her?"

"Man shot her. Needs help." McKee said. "Go help her."

"Who shot her?" the man asked.

"Man named Eddie." McKee said. He was very tired. Why didn't this fool go? "Don't worry," he said, "Eddie's dead now." He heard the man asking him something but he couldn't think of an answer. And then the man's hands were on his face, the man was talking right into his face.

"Listen. Tell me. What happened to Eddie? What happened to Eddie? And was there a man with him? Where's the man who was with him?"

McKee couldn't think of how to answer. Something was wrong.

He tried to say, "Dead," but Jim Hall was talking again.

"Answer me, damn you," Hall said, his voice fierce. "Do the police know about this? Has anybody told the police?"

McKee thought he would answer in a moment. Now he was concentrating on not falling over on his side.

Hall stood up. He was talking to the boy with the red baseball cap, and then the boy was talking. McKee could hear part of it.

"Did you see the witch he killed?"

He couldn't hear what the boy answered.

"You were right when you guessed that," Hall was saying. This man here is a Navajo Wolf. Give me your rifle."

McKee stopped listening. He was asking himself how Jim Hall knew about the man with Eddie, asking himself why Hall was acting the way he was acting. Almost immediately, with sick, despairing clarity, he saw the answer. Hall was the Big Navajo's other man.

The boy hadn't given Hall the rifle. He was standing there, looking doubtful.

"Put the rifle in the truck then," Hall said. "We'll leave the witch here. Tie him up first. And then we'll drive to Chinle and tell the police about him." Hall paused. "Hand me the rifle and I'll put it in the truck."

"Don't," McKee said. "Don't give him the rifle."

Hall turned to look at him. McKee focused on the face. It looked angry. And then it didn't look angry any more. Another voice had said something, something in Navajo.

It said, "That's right, Billy Nez, don't give him your rifle." And the anger left Jim Hall's face as McKee looked at it, and it looked shocked and sick. Then it was gone.

McKee gave up. He fell over on his side. Much better.

The metallic sound of the door in the van slamming and then a voice, the voice of Joe Leaphorn, and a little later a single loud pop.

I can't faint now, McKee told himself, because I have to tell him about Ellen. But he fainted.

Chapter 18

He was aware first of the vague sick smell of ether, of the feel of hospital sheets, of the cast on his chest, and of the splint bandaged tightly on his right hand. The room was dark. There was the shape of a man standing looking out the window into the sunlight. The man was Joe Leaphorn.

"Did you find her?" McKee asked.

"Sure," Leaphorn said. He sat beside the bed. "We found her before we found you, as a matter of fact." He interrupted McKee's question. "She's right down the hall. Broken cheekbone and a broken shoulder and some lost blood."

He looked down at McKee, grinning. "They had to put about ten gallons in you. You were dry."

"She's going to be all right?"

"She's already all right. You've been in here two days."

McKee thought for a while.

"Her boyfriend," he said. "How'd it all come out in the canyon?"

"Son of a bitch shot himself," Leaphorn said. "Walked right away from me into the truck, and slammed the door and locked it and got out a little .22 he had in there and shot himself right through the forehead." Leaphorn's expression was sour. "Walked right in with me just standing there," he added. He didn't sound like he could make himself believe it.

McKee felt sick. Maybe it was the ether.

"You've got more Navajo blood in you now than I do," Leaphorn said. "The doc said you had a busted oil pan. Took ten gallons."

"I guess you had to tell her about Hall."

"She knows."

"He must have been crazy," McKee said.

"Crazy to get rich," Leaphorn said. "You call it ambition. Sometimes we call it witchcraft. You remember the Origin Myth, when First Woman sent the Heron diving back into the Fourth World to get the witchcraft bundle. She told him to swim down and bring back 'the way to make money.'"

"Knock off the philosophy," McKee said. "What happened? How did you find her?"

"I've noticed this before," Leaphorn said. "Belacani women are smarter than you Belacani men. Miss Leon got herself over to that camp stove on that cliff. She poured out the kerosene and made herself a smoky little smudge fire. You could see it for miles."

He grinned at McKee.

"Something else she figured out that you might like to know about. She was having her doubts about Hall when I got there. All excited. Said you'd gone to find him and she was afraid something might happen to you. Miss Leon wanted me to climb up that split in the cliff and go chasing across that plateau to rescue you."

McKee felt better. He was, in fact, feeling wonderful.

"Why didn't you think of something simple, like making a big smoke?" Leaphorn asked. "Climbing up that crack in the rock was showing off."

"How was I going to know you'd be wandering around out there?" McKee asked. "It's supposed to be the cavalry that arrives in the nick of time, not the blanket-ass Indians."

McKee had a sobering thought. "I guess you know I killed those two men?"

"Not officially, you didn't," Leaphorn said. "Officially, we've got just two dead people. Officially, Dr. Canfield and Jim Hall were killed in a truck accident. Miss Leon and you were hurt in the crash. And officially Eddie Poher and George Jackson never existed."

"Was that their names? And what was going on in there, anyway? What was Hall doing?"

"It's a secret," Leaphorn said.

"Like hell it's a secret," McKee said. "If you want me to tell some phony story about Canfield getting killed in a truck wreck, you don't have secrets."

"I'm not really supposed to know all of it myself."

"But you do," McKee said.

Leaphorn looked at him a long moment.

"Well," he said. "You cut one of his cables so I guess you know Hall had portable radar sets staked out on that plateau. And you know that plateau is under the route from the Tonepah Range up in Utah down to White Sands Proving Grounds."

"Yeah," McKee said. "I knew that much." He wondered why he hadn't thought of radar.

"Hall was sitting with his radar right under what the military calls its 'Bird Path,' and when the birds flew from Tonepah the radar was feeding information into a computer in the van. Hall was putting it into tapes."

"What were they testing?"

"The military intelligence people don't tell a Navajo cop things like that."

"I'll bet you can guess."

Leaphorn looked at him again. "Maybe the MIRV. The Multiple Intercontinental Re-entry Vehicle. Read about it in Newsweek. One missile, but it drops off five or six warheads and some decoys. I'd guess that if I was guessing."

"It still doesn't make sense. What was he doing with the information and how'd a guy like Hall get tied up with that bunch?"

"If you'll shut up and listen, I'll tell you."

From what they now knew, Leaphorn explained, Hall, Poher, and Jackson had arrived on the Reservation separately almost two months ago. A fingerprint check had been enlightening. Poher was relatively unknown. One arrest on suspicion of conspiracy to rob a bank, some East Coast Mafia associations, but no convictions. Jackson was another story. He was also known as Amos Raven, and Big Raven and George Thomas, with a long and violent juvenile record dating back into the late thirties in Los Angeles, and one adult conviction for armed robbery, and a half-dozen arrests for questioning in an assortment of crimes of violence-all Mafia-connected.

"A Relocation Indian. Jackson seems to have been born in Los Angeles." Leaphorn laughed. "California Navajo. That's what had me hung up. I was expecting him to act like The People and all he knew about The People he must have got out of a book."

"Case Studies in Navajo Ethnic Aberrations, for one," McKee said, "by John Greersen."

"Anyway," Leaphorn continued, "Jackson had apparently been picked for this assignment simply because he was a Navajo and looked like one. His job must have been to help Hall set up his equipment and make sure that nobody knew what was going on. It wouldn't have seemed difficult, for the very reason the military chose this route for its overland missile. The country was almost completely deserted. Hall set up in Many Ruins Canyon complex, which The People avoid because of the Anasazi ghosts, and Jackson scared the few stragglers out by pretending to be a witch."

"Except Horseman," McKee said.

"Yeah. Except Horseman." Leaphorn's voice was flat.

"It wasn't your fault," McKee said.

"Remember what I said to Jackson at the trading post? I said if Horseman don't come out we'll come in looking for him. So Jackson brought him out for us and laid him out where we couldn't miss him."

"Use your head, Joe. There was no way you could have stopped it from happening."

"I was slow figuring it out," Leaphorn said. "I smelled something about Jackson. But I figured him to act like a Navajo and he was acting like a white man."

"Thanks a lot," McKee said.

"If he was a Navajo, no matter what he was doing in there, killing Horseman would have screwed it up for him. He would have gone off somewhere and had a sweat bath, and then he would have found himself a Singer and got himself cured and forgot about it."

Leaphorn told McKee about the Enemy Way and about finding the place where Jackson had built the road up Ceniza Mesa.

"He had put one of the radar sets up there and then he was improving his road so he could get it down fast, without using the winch. When he missed his hat, he knew someone had seen him, so he moved the radar back over to the plateau. I didn't know about the radar but it was beginning to be clear by then that there had to be a lot of money involved somewhere. You put it together-a lot. of money and a killing. It's not natural, and it's not Navajo."

"All right," McKee said. "I'll buy that. But how did Hall get into it?"

"I don't know," Leaphorn said. "I hear the federals are looking into a little West Coast electronics company with Mafia ownership. I think Hall did some work for them before-something legitimate." He looked at McKee pensively. "Didn't that business about Jackson wanting you to write the letter tell you something?"

"It told me he didn't want anybody coming in there looking for us," McKee said. "What else?"

"Think about it," Leaphorn said. "If you have a bunch of computer tapes giving you the exact performance of the other guy's ballistic missile system, it's worth a bunch of money. But it's worth a lot more if the other side doesn't suspect you've got it. Right?"

"Because if he suspects he changes the system," McKee said. "Eddie said something about that. About the letter being worth a lot of money."

A nurse came in then, a Navajo girl, in the uniform of the Indian Service Hospital. She scolded Leaphorn for staying too long, took McKee's temperature and gave him a capsule and a drink of water.

When McKee awoke again, there was a tray beside his bed with a covered dish of food on it, and beside the dish was an envelope.

He turned the envelope in his good hand, aware before he opened it of the familiar feeling of his common sense struggling with his perennial incurable optimism. The note inside was from Ellen Leon. Tomorrow, it began, the doctor would let her come to visit him. It was not just fourteen blunt words in blue ink on blue paper. It was a long letter.