The Dark Wind

'You're right,' West said.

Chee got up. He took the envelope out of his pocket.

'Is this really the three of diamonds in here?'

'Whatever you said it was. Three of diamonds, I think you said.'

Chee opened the envelope. He pulled out the three of diamonds.

'How do you do that?'

'Magic,' West said, grinning.

'I can't figure out the angle.'

West spread his great hands. 'I'm a magician,' he said. 'For years, a professional. With the circus in the good days and then many years with the carnivals.'

'But you're not going to tell me how it works?'

'Takes the fun out of it,' West said. 'Just think about it as mind over matter.'

'Thanks for the coffee,' Chee said. He put on his hat. 'Fine-looking boy you've got there.' Chee nodded toward the photographs. 'Is he still in the Marines?'

All the easy mobility left West's big face. It froze. 'He was killed,' he said.

'I'm sorry,' Chee said. 'In the Marines?'

He wished he hadn't asked the question. West wasn't going to answer it. But he did.

'After he got out,' West said. 'He made some bad friends in El Paso. They killed him.'

Chapter Seven

At dawn, Chee parked the pickup at the windmill. He slammed the door behind him and stood facing the glow on the eastern horizon. He yawned and stretched and inhaled deeply of the cold early air. He felt absolutely fine. This was hozro. This was the beauty that Changing Woman taught them to attain. This was the feeling of harmony, of being in tune. The orange glow in the east turned to a hot yellow as Chee sang his dawn chant. There was no one in miles to hear him. He shouted it, greeting Dawn Boy, greeting the sun, blessing the new day. 'Let beauty walk before me,' Chee sang. 'Let beauty walk behind me. Let beauty walk all around me.' He opened his shirt, extracted his medicine pouch, took out a pinch of pollen, and offered it to the moving air. 'In beauty it is finished,' Chee sang.

The mood continued through breakfast—hot coffee from his stainless-steel thermos and two sandwiches of bologna and thin, hard Hopi piki bread. As he chewed he reviewed. Did Joseph Musket disappear to set up a narcotics hijacking? Was the burglary done simply to provide a cover motive for his disappearance? That would explain why none of the missing jewelry had turned up. Or had Joseph Musket's disappearance some connection with the murder of John Doe? The burglary had been two nights after they'd brought in Doe's body. Could Musket have intentionally provoked West into firing him because—once the body was found—there was some reason he had to run and he wanted to run without causing suspicion? For a moment that seemed to make some sense. But only for a moment. Then Chee remembered that there hadn't been any genuine effort to hide the body. It had been left along the path to Kisigi Spring. Isolated and not often used, but the only route to an important Hopi shrine, if Dashee knew what he was talking about. That provoked another thought. If you could learn from the Hopis when the shrine was visited, you could get a closer estimation—or maybe you could—of when the man had been killed there. All they had now was the medical examiner's casual estimate of 'dead not more than a month, not less than two weeks.' Would knowing when the body appeared on the trail help?

Chee took another bite, chewed, and thought about it. He couldn't see how. But who knows? At the moment he felt supremely optimistic. A brace of horned larks were singing their morning song beyond the windmill and the air was cool against his face and the crusty piki bread was tasting of wheat and bacon fat in his mouth. Someday he would unravel John Doe. Someday he would find Joseph Musket. (Why do they call you Ironfingers?) Someday, perhaps even today, he would catch the man who was vandalizing this windmill. He felt in harmony with all such things this morning—capable even of persuading these strange Black Mesa Navajos to confide in him about their witch. In a moment the sun would be high enough to give him the slanting light he needed to read even the faintest tracks. Then he would see what he could learn about this latest vandalism. Probably he would learn nothing very much. But even if the hard-packed, drought-baked earth told him nothing at all, that, too, would be right and proper, in tune with his relationship with this ugly windmill and the vandal who so hated it. Sooner or later he would understand this business. He'd find the cause. Senseless as it seemed, there'd be a reason behind it. The wind did not move, the leaf did not fall, the bird did not cry, nor did the windmill provoke such violent anger without a reason. All was part of the universal pattern, as Changing Woman had taught them when she formed the first four Navajo clans. Jim Chee had ingested that fact with his mother's milk, and from the endless lessons his uncle taught him. 'All is order,' Hosteen Nakai taught him. 'Look for the pattern.'

Chee left half the coffee in the thermos and wrapped a towel around the bottle. That, with two more bologna sandwiches still in his sack, would serve for lunch. A covey of Gambel's quail, their long topknot feathers bobbing, paraded single file along the slope below the windmill, heading for the arroyo a hundred yards to the north. The quail would be after an early-morning drink. Far down the arroyo three cottonwoods stood—two alive and one a long-dead skeleton. They were the only such trees in miles and must mark a shallow water table. Perhaps a spring. Without some source of water, the drought would force all birds away from here.

Chee found scuff marks on the earth, left by the vandal and by the Hopi who had discovered the vandalism. They told him nothing useful. Then he examined the mill itself. This time the vandal had used some sort of lever to kink the long connecting rod that tied the gear mechanism overhead to the pump cylinder in the well casing. It was an efficient means of destruction which left the force of the turning blades and the pumping action to strip the gears. But the vandal was exhausting such opportunities. Now the footing bolts were securely brazed into place, and the gearbox was secured. The custodians of the windmill could easily prevent a repetition of this new outrage by using a two-inch pipe to provide a protective sleeve for the pump rod. Chee scrutinized the mill thoughtfully, looking for weak points. He found nothing that could be damaged without some sort of special equipment. A portable cutting torch, for example, could take a slice out of one of the metal legs and topple the whole affair again, or make hash out of the gearbox once more. But the vandal so far hadn't used anything sophisticated. Horses, a rope, a steel bar—nothing complicated. What could a man without equipment do now to cause serious damage? The best he could find involved putting the mill in neutral to stop pump action, then pouring cement down the pump shaft. That would require only a small plastic funnel, a sack of cement, some sand, and a bucket. Maybe a ten-dollar investment. And the solution would be permanent. The sun was higher now and Chee broadened his search, covering the ground in widening circles. He found hoofprints and human tracks, but nothing interesting. Then he dropped into the arroyo and scouted it—first upstream and then down. Someone who wore moccasins had used its