'It was the right thing to do,' Chee said. It was exactly what he would have done himself. Purified himself from prison, and all the hostile, alien ways the prison represented. The character of Joseph Musket took on a new dimension.
'Why do you come to ask me questions this time? Before, another policeman came.'
'That's because the police station at Chinle is closer,' Chee explained. 'A policeman came from there to save money and time.'
'Then why do you come now?'
'Because there are many odd things about that burglary,' Chee said. 'Many questions I can't answer. I am curious.'
'Do you know my son did not steal that pawn?'
'I don't know who stole it,' Chee said.
'I know he didn't. Do you know why? Because he had money!' Mrs. Musket said it triumphantly. The ultimate proof.
'There are people among the
Mrs. Musket's expression was skeptical. The concept was totally foreign to her.
'He had hundred-dollar bills,' she said. 'Many of them.' She held up six fingers. 'And other money in his purse. Twenty-dollar bills.' She looked at Chee quizzically, waiting for him to concede that no one with hundred-dollar bills could be suspected of stealing. Certainly no Navajo would be likely to.
'He had this money when he first got here?'
Mrs. Musket nodded. 'He wrote us that he was coming and my husband took the pickup truck on the day and drove out to Window Rock to meet the bus. He had all that money then.'
Chee was trying to remember what prisoners were given when they left the penitentiary. Twenty dollars, he thought. That and whatever they might have in the canteen fund. A maximum of another fifty dollars, he suspected.
'It doesn't sound like he would steal the jewelry if he had all that money,' Chee said. 'But where did he go? Why doesn't he talk to us and tell us he didn't steal it?'
Mrs. Musket wasn't going to answer that question. Not directly at least. Finally she said, 'They put him in prison once.'
'Why was that?'
'He made bad friends,' Mrs. Musket said.
Chee asked for a drink of water, got it, drank it, changed the subject. They talked of desperate difficulties of sheepherding in a drought. All her sons-in-law were out with their herds, as was her husband, and now they had to drive them so far for grass and water that they could not return to their hogans at night. The women took them food. And already they had lost eleven lambs and even some of the ewes were dying. With Chee guiding it, the conversation gradually edged back to Joseph Musket. He had always been good with sheep. A careful hand with the shears, adept at castration. Reliable. A good boy. Even when he had been thrown from his horse and smashed his fingers and had to wear metal splints for so long, he could still shear faster than most young men. And he had told her that when he finished working at Burnt Water—by the end of summer—he would have plenty of money to buy his own herd. A big herd. He planned to buy two hundred ewes. But first he would go to all the squaw dances, find himself a young woman to marry. Someone whose family had plenty of grazing rights.
'He said that after he worked for the trading post a little while he didn't want to have anything else to do with the white men after that,' Mrs. Musket said. 'He said he only had one white man who had ever been a friend, and that all the others just got you in trouble.'
'Did he say who the friend was?'
'It was a boy he knew when he went to the Cottonwood school,' Mrs. Musket said. 'I can't remember what he called him.'
'Was it West?' Chee asked.
'West,' Mrs. Musket said. 'I think so.'
'Does he have any other friends? Navajo friends?'
Mrs. Musket examined Chee thoughtfully. 'Just some young men around here,' she said vaguely. 'Maybe some friends he made when he was away with the white people. I don't think so.'
Chee could think of nothing more to ask. Not with any hope of getting an answer. He gave Mrs. Musket the message about the cost of the water barrel being added to her pawn ticket and climbed back in the truck.
Mrs. Musket stood in the yard of the hogan, watching him. Her hands clasped together at her waist, twisting nervously.
'If you find him,' she said, 'tell him to come home.'
Chapter Eighteen
Chee spent the next day as Largo had arranged, a long way from Tuba City and Wepo Wash. He drove fifty miles north toward the Utah border to see a woman named Mary Joe Natonabah about her complaint that her grazing right on Twenty-nine Mile Wash was being trespassed by somebody else's sheep. She identified the trespasser as an old man called Largewhiskers Begay, who had his camp in the Yondots Mountains. That took Chee to Cedar Ridge Trading Post and down the horrible dirt road which leads westward toward the Colorado River gorge. He found the Begay camp, but not Largewhiskers, who had gone to Cameron to see about something or other. The only person at the camp was a surly young man with his arm in a cast, who identified himself as the son-in-law of Large-whiskers Begay. Chee told this young man of the Natonabah complaint, warned him of the consequences of violating another person's grazing right, and told him to tell Largewhiskers he'd be back one day to check it all out. By then it was noon. Chee's next job took him to Nipple Butte, where a man named Ashie McDonald had reportedly beaten up his cousin. Chee found the camp but not Ashie McDonald. McDonald's mother-in-law
