working a still right after the Korean War. We never did find him.' Takes looked as though the thought still irritated him. 'We knew he had to be close to water and at least have a horse to haul the grain in, but booze came out of there for four years and we never found nothing.'
'It wouldn't take that Nez outfit four years to find itself a witch,' Leaphorn said.
Takes laughed. 'If you're worrying about that,' he said, 'they're going to have an Enemy Way. That ought to take care of the witch.'
'Who's having it?' Leaphorn asked. 'Somebody in the Nez family?'
'I heard it was Charley Tsosie,' Takes said. 'But they're Nez kinfolks-part of the same outfit.'
McKee was interested. Old Lady Gray Rocks had mentioned Tsosie being bothered by the witch. But the Prostitution Way was the curing ceremonial held for those exposed to witchcraft-to turn the evil around and direct it back against the Wolf who started it. Why an Enemy Way? McKee thought about the rite. It had grown out of the fighting between the Dinee and the Utes, and the only times he had heard of its being used was when members of The People came home after being off the Reservation, people like discharged servicemen, people who had been in contact with foreign influences-white men, or Pueblo Indians, or Mexicans. He remembered again what the old woman had said about the witch being a stranger. Leaphorn was looking at him.
'If they're having an Enemy Way, that old woman must have told you right,' Leaphorn said. 'They think it's an outsider, and if they think that, they didn't think it was Horseman and that wasn't why he was killed.'
'Wonder why he was,' Takes said. 'Usually there's a feud, or fighting over a woman, or somebody bad- mouthing somebody.'
'Maybe he found that whiskey still you were looking for,' McKee said.
'Hasn't been any bootleg whiskey turning up in years,' Takes said.
'How about that rocket the military lost three, four years ago?' Leaphorn said. 'Is that ten-thousand-dollar reward still out for anyone finding that thing?'
'I don't know,' Takes said. 'I don't think they ever found it.'
'I'll call the people up at the Tonepah Range and find out if they're still offering ten thousand dollars,' Leaphorn said. He explained to McKee that missiles fired from the Tonepah test site in Utah to the impact area at White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico passed over the empty eastern expanse of the Reservation.
'They used to lose one now and then when a second stage misfired, and then they'd have a hell of a time finding it,' Leaphorn said. 'But now they have a radar station over on Tall Poles Butte and they track 'em all the way to the ground.
'You think maybe Horseman and somebody else both found the old rocket and fought over who'd get the reward?' McKee asked.
Leaphorn shrugged. He asked Bishbito if he could use his office telephone for a long-distance call.
McKee finished his meal, eating dutifully, feeling simultaneously disappointed and ashamed of that disappointment. He had once again, as he had for years, fallen victim to his optimism. Expecting something when there was always nothing. Anticipating some romantic mystery in what Takes and Leaphorn must already see as a sordid, routine little homicide. It was this flaw, he knew, that had cost him these last eight years of anguish, turned to misery, turned to what now was simply numbness. He could still see the note, blue ink on blue paper in Sara's easy script:
'Berg. I am meeting Scotty in Las Vegas tonight. I won't contest the divorce.'
Simply that, and her signature. It was not Sara's style to add the unnecessary explanation, to say that he was a dull, nondescript man in a dull, dead-end job, and that Scotty was exciting, in an exciting world of money and executive jets and Caribbean weekends. He cursed himself as he always did when he thought of it, cursed the flaw that made him ignore the fact that he was a clumsy, unbrilliant, average man, grotesquely misfit in the circle of slim, cool Saras and reckless, witty Scotts.
He turned away from the memory and thought of Horseman, another failure as a man, wondering why he had let himself expect anything exotic in his death. And then he turned away from that thought, too. Horseman was none of his business. He would get back to his research, now. The Charley Tsosie family would be busy, taking ritual sweat baths and preparing for their curing ceremonial. But there was still Ben Yazzie to be interviewed and Afraid of His Horse to be found.
He flipped through his notebook. Old Lady Gray Rocks had said Ben Yazzie grazed his sheep back on the Lukachukai plateau in the summer. He would go to the subagency office and find out where Yazzie and Afraid of His Horse had their hogans. And then he would get on with his interviewing. He reread the notes he had accumulated at Shoemaker's and from talking to the old woman. Nothing much on Afraid of His Horse, but the Yazzie gossip followed the usual pattern. A man at the trading post had said Yazzie had noticed a coyote following him, and since the coyote was the messenger of the Holy People, Yazzie had accepted this as a sign of danger. And then there had been the usual sounds in the night, interpreted as the witch trying to put corpse powder down the smoke hole in the hogan roof, and the usual dead lambs, and the usual third-hand account in which Yazzie had seen a dog hanging around the flock and, when the dog ran away, it turned into a man.
Leaphorn was returning from his telephone call; McKee returned the notebook to his pocket. He would start with Yazzie this afternoon.
'Well,' Leaphorn said, 'there went our motive.' He sat down. 'The colonel said the reward expired two years ago. Their lost bird is obsolete now.' He laughed. 'In fact, I think he's hoping it stays lost. Sort of embarrassing to lose one like that and then have it turn up after everybody's forgotten about it.'
'So we're right back noplace,' Takes said.
'I had an idea,' McKee said. 'Let's say somebody else was hiding out back in that area and they didn't want the Navajo police coming in with a search party. Let's say they decided the way to keep that from happening was to get Horseman out where he would be found.'
As he said it, McKee realized it sounded hopelessly farfetched, but Leaphorn's face was grim.
'I thought of that, too,' he said. 'The autopsy showed he was killed between six and midnight the day I was at Shoemaker's telling everybody we were going in after him if he didn't come out. If we figure it that way, I'm the one who got him killed.'
