The Wailing Wind

crying or wailing and thinking it must be a woman. I know your security folks helped the deputy check around the next day and no one ever found anything. Has anything interesting turned up since then?'

'Not that I heard of,' Mrs. Hano said.

'But since you mentioned the Doherty boy,' Leaphorn said, 'what was it he wanted to look at in the archives when he was out here?'

'The gold-mining stuff,' Mrs. Hano said. She made a wry face. 'We don't get many archive customers out here. And they come in two kinds. They're either students working on stuff in history or anthropology. Writing something about the 'Long Walk' you Navajos went on, or about the time we were keeping the Mexican Revolution refugees out here. Or wanting to look at the Matthews papers.'

She had pulled open a drawer below the counter, extracted a ledger and flopped it open.

'Are the ethnography professors still going over the Matthews stuff?' Leaphorn asked. He'd done it himself when he was working on his master's thesis at Arizona State. Dr. Washington Matthews had been a surgeon at the fort in the 1880s and '90s, had learned the language and had written report after report on the religion and culture of the Navajos—pretty well laying the groundwork for scholarly studies of the tribe. But by now Leaphorn guessed the anthropologists had pretty well plowed the Matthews papers.

'Washington Matthews,' Mrs. Hano said. 'Your hataalii neez. Your 'tall doctor.' Haven't had any ethnographers rereading his stuff lately, but the gold hunters have discovered him.'

'Really,' Leaphorn said. 'What'd he know about that?'

'Wrote a letter about some of the tall tales the prospectors coming in here were telling back then. I think that's it.'

'Was Doherty one of them?'

'I guess indirectly,' she said. 'What he wanted was to see whatever that McKay fellow looked at. The man Mr. Denton shot.'

'Doherty, too? From what I've read there are several reports in these files about the troubles the prospectors were having with us, and the Apaches and the Utes, and what they were reporting about their finds. Would Doherty run across the Matthews stuff looking through that? Sort of on a fishing expedition?'

'I don't think so. I remember him real well because he came in here several times and he'd spend a lot of time reading and I didn't know him and I didn't want him slipping out with anything. But no. The first time he was here he asked about the Matthews letters, and if we had copies of his correspondence with a doctor back in Boston. He had the doctor's name and the dates with a bunch of filing cards in his briefcase. He pretty well knew what he wanted.'

'You know, Mrs. Hano, I think I should take a look at that correspondence. Could you help me find it?'

She did.

The letter Doherty had wanted to see came out of a carton labeled 'Box 3, W.M. Correspondence (copies).' Most of it was devoted to telling a friend at Harvard of the way in which one must go about his hobby of collecting Navajo history—of knowing the season and the place where certain stories should be told, and the social ritual of brewing the coffee, of preparing the 'mountain tobacco' to be rolled in corn shucks and smoked, and of assuring each of the elders assembled in the hogan that you really wanted to know the story he had to tell. Leaphorn found himself smiling as he read it, thinking how nothing had changed from that day in 1881. The old traditionalist still, as Matthews reported it, refrained from 'telling the complete story,' and would hold something back, passing the account along to the next speaker, so that all of it would not emerge 'from one man's mouth.'

True as that material remained, it couldn't have been what had drawn Doherty here. That came on the final page. There Matthews reported that 'many of these old fellows take great pleasure in misleading us whites, trying to see how gullible we will be. That, of course, makes it necessary for us belagaana who are serious about understanding their culture to make sure that we don't swallow stories which come just 'from one man's mouth.'

'One of their sources of private amusement are tales of how they have misled this plague of gold prospectors —the men who swarmed into these mountains with their greed inspired by the great discoveries in California and the Black Hills. For example, the records here at Wingate suggest the famous 'Lost Adams diggings,' of which I have told you previously, are'two days travel' from the fort, and the equally notorious 'Golden Calf' bonanza was also said to be 'an easy day's ride' from our post here. Among the gold seekers, the universally accepted dogma is that the direction from here is south, over the Zuni Mountains. My old, old friend Anson Bai tells me, and the same comes from other mouths, that both of those gold deposits were actually found in the opposite direction—north of the fort toward Mesa de los Lobos and Coyote Canyon. They say this misdirection was provided deliberately by various Navajo guides partly because of these people's ineffable sense of humor and partly out of patriotism. They understand that the worst thing that can happen to a tribe is to have whites discover gold deposits on the tribe's land.'

Leaphorn reread the letter, returned it to its place, and closed the box.

'You don't need a copy?'

'No thanks,' Leaphorn said. 'I can remember it.'

'You read that last part?'

Leaphorn nodded.

'Like what happened to those tribes in California,' Mrs. Hano said. 'Pretty well exterminated. The Nez Perce, and the people up in the Dakotas.'

Mrs. Hano was a Zuni married to a Hopi, Leaphorn remembered. But if he had her family properly sorted out, then one of her daughters married an Osage. Finding oil on Osage land had pretty well killed off that tribe.

'Mr. Doherty had you make copies of that letter. Is that right?'

'Just one,' Mrs. Hano said. 'He said he was in a hurry.'

'Did he say why?'

Mrs. Hano shook her head. 'None of my business, and I didn't ask. I remembered that Mr. McKay was in a hurry, too. He had someone waiting for him in his car.'