examined his left hand again. It was a broad hand with strong blunt fingers, two of them crooked. He wiggled the bent knuckle of his first finger and tried to remember how it had felt when he stuck it into that line drive when he was seventeen. He could only remember that it had been swollen for days and that the error had let in two unearned runs.
The distorted knuckle on the second finger was the souvenir of a less serious mishap. He had picked it up in practice where the errors didn't go into the record books. Funny thing about his fielding, McKee thought. Never could learn it. He could hit anybody who ever pitched to him. Bunt and hit to either field, and he had had the power for a kid his age, but finally the coach had used him as a pinch hitter. 'Damnit, Berg,' the coach had said, 'if I leave you out there, you're going to get hit on the head and killed.' That had ended his ambitions to be a baseball player, but it still seemed odd to him that the simple skill of timing a grounder and sensing the trajectory of a fly ball had been beyond him. McKee carefully replaced the injured hand in his shirt front. It was throbbing now, but the pain was tolerable. He stood up, surprised at how quickly his leg muscles had stiffened. A mockingbird flew out of a young cotton-wood tree, whistling raucously. It was then McKee was suddenly struck with the dismaying thought of Miss Ellen Leon.
Almost certainly in a very few hours he would meet her and, when he did, he would have to make her believe an absolutely incredible story. He walked slowly down the canyon, thinking of how he would tell it. As he thought, the incident seemed first wildly ridiculous and then entirely unreal. The canyon was filled with the cool, gray light of full dawn now. All that had happened under the moonlight was utterly absurd, like something out of a bad melodrama, and his own role in it had been thoroughly unheroic. Yet Miss Leon had to be told-to get her out of the canyon. There simply was no way to explain it all without sounding like a complete fool. McKee wished fervently that the visitor were a man.
He trudged steadily down the canyon, turning in his mind the problem of confronting the woman. He had skipped shaving yesterday in his haste to get to Chinle and call Leaphorn. Now the face which confronted him each morning in his bathroom mirror would be worse by two days' growth of bristles. And the torn and dirty shirt and the scraped cheekbone certainly wouldn't inspire confidence in a female. Neither, he thought glumly, would the improbable tale he had to tell.
When he heard the sound of the motor again, it came almost as a relief. He was crossing the point where a large tributary canyon drained into Many Ruins and where centuries of turbulent runoff had carved the cliffs into a series of horseshoe bends. The motor sound and its confusion of echoes seemed first to come from upstream, and then from downstream. Before it died abruptly away he decided the vehicle might be somewhere up the tributary. Talking Rock Canyon, he thought it was, but he wasn't sure. In the morning sunlight the sound of the truck seemed natural and sane, reassuring him that all that had happened in the darkness had not been merely nightmare.
And now he was sitting beside Miss Leon and she was saying that she wanted very badly to see Dr. Canfield this morning.
McKee converted his embarrassment to irritation.
'Listen,' he said. 'There's a man somewhere up this canyon who isn't acting rationally. I think he may have done something to Dr. Canfield. I don't know where the hell Canfield is and I can't start looking for him until I get you out of here.'
Miss Leon said, 'Oh,' in a small voice and looked at McKee. He noticed again that she was a very pretty woman.
She thinks I'm a nut, he thought.
'Canfield was gone when I got back to the camp yesterday,' McKee went on. 'Left me a note and signed it 'John.' His name's Jeremy.' Even as he said it, the explanation sounded ridiculous. Miss Leon glanced at him.
'What did the note say?'
'It said a Navajo had come by with a snakebite and he was taking him to Teec Nos Pas.' The text of the note now seemed completely reasonable. 'But why would he sign it with a phony name?'
'Maybe it was a joke,' Miss Leon said.
Maybe it
'I thought of that, too,' McKee said, 'But last night, sometime after midnight, I saw a man sneaking up on our tent. Had a wolf skin over his head.' He had planned not to mention the wolf skin, thinking it might frighten her, or merely make the entire episode seem more ludicrous. But he blurted it out.
'Is that how you got that awful bruise? Did he hit you?'
The sympathy in her voice made McKee feel about seven years old.
'No. No,' he said, impatiently. 'I fell on a rock.'
Miss Leon slowed the Volks and shifted into low gear to make her way across a bed of rocks.
'Your hand's hurt, too,' Miss Leon said.
'I'd like you to drive back to Shoemaker's,' McKee said. 'When you get there, tell Shoemaker that something happened to Canfield and ask him to call Chinle and get the Law and Order boys to send someone in here to help look.'
McKee made a wry face.
'Or, if you meet Canfield on your way to Shoemaker's, just forget the whole thing.' He laughed. Tell Canfield you met some kind of nut up the canyon named Bergen McKee.'
'All right,' Miss Leon said. She glanced at the right hand held rigidly inside his shirt front. 'How badly…'
Immediately ahead of them around an abrupt bend of the canyon, there was the whining sound of a motor running at a high speed.
'Stop a minute,' McKee said, but Miss Leon was already braking the car.
As he reached across with his left hand for the door handle, he brushed the injured finger and felt suddenly sick and weak as a fresh wave of pain engulfed his brain. He swung his legs out of the Volks and sat for a moment, head down, while the dizziness passed. He heard Miss Leon opening her door.
'I'll go see what's going on,' he said. 'You wait here.' He realized, with self-disgust, that the words came slowly and his voice was thick. When he got to his feet she was already out of the car. Let it go, he thought. He
