'What happened?'
'I twisted it.' She looked frightened.
He looked at her wordlessly, feeling for the first time in his life absolutely helpless. He walked back down the rocks toward her.
'How bad is it?' He squatted beside her, looking at the ankle. It was a very trim ankle, with no sign yet of swelling.
'I don't know. It hurts.'
'Can you put your weight on it?'
'I don't think so.'
McKee sat down and rubbed the back of his hand across his forehead. His head ached.
'We'll wait awhile,' he said finally. 'When it feels better, well go on.'
He tried to think. If her ankle was sprained, it would swell soon. And if it was sprained it would be almost impossible for her to make the climb out. The long walk across rough country to Shoemaker's would be even more impossible. At least twenty-five miles, he calculated. Perhaps farther from here. What if they simply waited here? Would the man in the Land-Rover follow them?
And what if he did? McKee tried to retrace all that had happened since yesterday. The rams with their throats slashed. The note from Canfield. The man who came in the darkness. What had that been in his hand there in the moonlight? Had it really been a pistol? The feeling of being hunted down the canyon. That seemed unreal now. Incredible. But the tree being winched across the canyon had been real. He tried to think of an explanation for it. There was none. It must have been intended to close the canyon behind Miss Leon's Volkswagen. To pen them in. He rubbed his forehead again, and pulled out his cigarettes. Miss Leon was sitting motionless just below him, resting her head on her hand.
She's not very big, he thought. Maybe 110 pounds. If it wasn't for this damned hand he could carry her. Miss Leon's short-cut hair had fallen around her face. Her neck was very slender and very smooth. He felt a sharp, poignant sadness.
'Would you like a cigarette?'
'No thank you,' Miss Leon said. She didn't look up.
'I can't tell you how sorry I am,' McKee said slowly. 'I know you must think I'm out of my mind. But that man…' He stopped. There was nothing to be gained by going over it again.
She looked at him then.
There's no reason for you to be sorry,' she said. 'I know you're just trying to protect me.'
McKee had thought her eyes were black or brown. They were dark blue. He looked away. If he was wrong about this she would forever think of him as the ultimate in idiots. And even if he was right, and she knew he was right, there was her fiance, the man she was trying so hard to find. And, he realized bleakly, it wouldn't matter anyway.
'But I think we should go back now. We have to go back.'
'Maybe so,' he said. If she couldn't walk there were no happy alternatives. He would simply have to gamble that he had been insanely wrong about it all. It occurred to him then that Miss Leon might be faking the injured ankle. He didn't think that would be like her. And then he thought about the tire tracks. There had only been one set, which meant the truck had either come out of this canyon before yesterday's rain, or had driven in and parked. A round trip would have left two sets of tracks. He walked up the canyon a few yards to where the brush closed in over the rocks. The branches had obviously been broken by something tearing its way upward. And unless the canyon bottom widened suddenly, and flattened-which looked impossible from here-it couldn't have gone much farther. 'I'll be right back,' McKee said. 'I'm going to see where that truck went.'
It proved easy enough to follow. Beyond the barrier of brush, its wheels had straddled the now-narrow stream bed, leaving two deep tracks in the loamy soil-tracks which disappeared behind a brush-covered outcropping of rock a hundred feet upstream. McKee walked slowly toward this screen, feeling a growing tenseness. Behind it he would find some sort of vehicle. It couldn't possibly be the Land-Rover. It might be, he realized, Canfield's camper. Or the pickup of some Navajo sheepherder. If it was Canfield's truck, where was Jeremy?
Canfield's camper was parked just behind the outcropping, its front wheels pulled up on a rock slope, tilting it at a sharp angle. McKee stood a moment looking at it. Then he looked up the canyon and stared up at the rimrock above. Nothing was in sight.
'Jeremy?' He kept his voice low.
There was no answer.
The truck was locked. He looked through the side window. No keys in the ignition. But Canfield's hat was on the floorboards. It was a plaid canvas fishing hat, with an oversized feather. A ridiculous hat, but why had Canfield left it behind?
McKee walked to the back of the pickup and peered through the small back window of the camper compartment. Canfield had stripped the interior and used it primarily for weather-proof storage. It was dark inside and McKee could see nothing at first. He pressed his face against the glass and used his left hand as a shield against the reflecting sunlight. He saw, first, a khaki shirt front and then the legs of a man. One was bent sharply at the knee and the other, extended, crossed it at the ankle. The man's head was out of sight, against the tailgate of the camper and directly below the window, outside McKee's line of vision.
He knew instantly that the form was that of Jeremy Canfield and the civilized instincts of his consciousness proclaimed that Canfield was asleep. But some infinitesimal fraction of a second later his reason told him that Jeremy was not asleep. Men did not sleep, head down, on such a steep slope.
McKee tried the handle on the camper again. It was locked. He looked around him for a rock, wrapped his left hand in his handkerchief, and smashed at the glass. It took five blows to force his way through the laminated safety window. He picked out the shards of glass still in the way and reached through, unsnapped the catchlock on the inside, raised the top panel on its hinges and dropped the tailgate. There was an outflow of warmer air escaping from the camper compartment and what had been Dr. J. R. Canfield slid a few inches toward him.
