'Miss Leon,' McKee screamed. 'Stop.'
The Volkswagen stopped.
McKee ran to it and pulled at the door. It was locked. He looked through the window. The girl sat huddled against the door on the driver's side, frightened eyes in a pale face.
McKee cursed inwardly, tried to pull his gaping shirt together, and tapped on the window.
'Miss Leon,' he said. 'I'm Bergen McKee. I was supposed to meet you here. Dr. Canfield and I.'
The girl, obviously, couldn't understand him. McKee repeated it all, shouting this time, conscious that the man with the machine pistol must have heard the Volkswagen and might now be taking aim.
The girl leaned across the front seat and pulled up the lock button; McKee was inside in an instant.
'Start turning the car around,' McKee ordered. 'Head it out of here.'
'What's wrong?' Miss Leon said. 'Where's Dr. Canfield?'
'Drive,' McKee ordered. 'Turn it around and drive and I'll explain.'
Miss Leon backed the car across the sand, cut the wheel sharply, and pulled the Volks back on the track. McKee opened his door and leaned out, staring back up the canyon. Nothing moved. He looked at Miss Leon, trying to decide how to start.
'What's wrong?' she asked again. 'What are we doing?'
She looked less frightened, but now as he turned toward her she saw the bruised side of his face, with the dried blood. Her expression became a mixture of shock and pity.
'I'm Bergen McKee,' McKee repeated. He felt immensely foolish. 'I'm not sure exactly what's wrong, but I want you to get out of this canyon until I can find out.'
Miss Leon looked at him wordlessly, and McKee felt himself flushing.
'I'm sorry I had to give you a scare like that,' he said.
'But what in the world is happening? Where's Dr. Canfield? And what happened to your face?'
'I don't know,' McKee said. 'I mean I don't know where Dr. Canfield is. It's going to be hard to explain it.'
He had spent much of his time since daylight planning how he would explain it all, and thinking how ridiculous he must inevitably seem while he tried.
During the night he had worked his way steadily down the canyon, keeping to the rocks close to the canyon wall. When the moon rose directly overhead, flooding the north side of the cliffs with light, he had lain under a growth of brush, resting and listening. And in this silence he had heard the sound of something moving on the rimrock, across the canyon and high above him. Whatever it was-and McKee had no doubt at all that it was the man with the wolf skin-its movements were stealthy. There was not the steady sound of unguarded footsteps on the rock. Only an occasional and very slight noise, with long pauses when there was no sound at all. In those pauses, McKee sensed the man was looking down from the rim, searching the canyon floor and listening for the sound of movement. The feeling was familiar, and less frightening because he had felt it before. Years before, when his company of the First Cavalry had been rearguard in the long, leapfrog retreat down the Korean Peninsula from Seoul toward the Pusan beachhead, he had learned how it felt to be hunted. And, he thought grimly, he had learned how to survive.
The sound had finally moved away from the rim. McKee allowed thirty minutes of silence, and then sprinted across the sand to the south wall. Here the moon's shadow would now fall and here he would be less visible from the rim. He had kept as high on the talus as he could, trading the easier going along the bottom for the invisibility offered by the rocks and brush. He moved steadily, but with infinite caution. His plan was simple. He would travel as far as he could until daylight and then he would find a place from which he could watch the bottom. There he would wait to intercept the car of Miss Leon. He would warn her, get her out of the canyon, send her back to Shoemaker's to get help, and then he would come back to look for Canfield. He no longer had even the faintest hope that the morning would bring Canfield driving up the canyon, safely back from a mercy trip with a snake-bitten Navajo. The sounds on the rimrock had killed that hope. If the motives of the man hunting him were less than sinister he would have been calling for him, not stalking him in silence. And that man, the man with the wolf skin and the pistol, must have stood beside Jeremy as he wrote the note and signed it 'John.'
He knew my name, McKee had thought. He must have read it in my papers in the tent. He could have learned Canfield's name the same way, but only his initials. And Canfield must have told him the J. was for John and tried, thus, to leave a warning. It occurred to McKee that if the Wolf had taken this trouble to learn who was living in the tent, he would also know of Ellen Leon. Her letter announcing her arrival time was on the table. The Wolf would only have to wait for her.
It had all seemed very obvious in darkness. The man who had stalked him must be insane. There seemed to be no other rational explanation. And this, too, might explain the puzzle of Horseman's murder.
An hour before dawn, when the moon was down and the canyon was almost totally dark, McKee had fallen. A stone shifted under his weight and he had plunged, off balance, eight feet against a slab of rock below. The impact had stunned him for a moment but he was back on his feet before he realized that the little finger on his right hand was pulled from its socket. He noticed its odd immobility before he felt the pain, saw that it was bent grotesquely backward and, when he tried to straighten it, felt the agony of the injured joint. He had sat on the stone then, frightened, trying to listen, to determine if his clumsy fall had alerted the man, but there was a roaring in his ears from the pain. Finally he had gone on, carrying his injured hand inside his shirt. It was then he heard the sound of the motor starting. There was the quick whine of the starter, the sound of a heavy motor, and gears shifting, and then the noise of wheels crunching over a stony surface. The sound came from above, and some distance down canyon. It moved away from him and in a few minutes there was silence again. The man who had stalked him had driven away. He had no way of guessing how far.
McKee had climbed down to the canyon bottom then. Walking was easy on the sand and soon it was dawn. He stopped at a pool where runoff had been trapped in a pocket of rocks. He drank thirstily of the sandy water and then used his left hand to wash as much blood as he could from his face. The skin had been scraped from the right side of his cheek and the bone felt bruised. He rested on a rock and gingerly examined his finger. It seemed to be broken in the knuckle and the tendon pulled loose in his palm. The sky overhead was lightening now and the rocks and trees across the canyon were clearly visible. Night had given way to dawn.
McKee pulled off his left boot and shook out the gravel it had picked up somehow during the night. And then he
