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.
