'How about you, Sergeant Chee? Are you willing to tell me?'
'A piece of evidence got misplaced,' Chee said. 'I wasn't sure how to deal with it, and I asked Lieutenant Leaphorn for advice. He handled it for me.'
Louisa laughed. 'No rules broken either, not so anyone would notice it. Right?'
'Let's just say no harm was done,' Leaphorn said.
Officer Bernadette Manuelito was hurrying up to the table, looking flustered, saying she was sorry to be late. Leaphorn pulled back a chair for her, introduced her to Louisa, told her he was glad she could join them.
'Sergeant Chee asked me to come,' Bernie said. 'He said you were interested in the Doherty homicide.'
'I think we were just talking about that,' Louisa said. 'Something that got Joe involved in it.'
Professor Bourbonette had been around long enough, attended enough meetings with touchy faculty prima donnas, to sense instantly that she would have been better off to have restricted herself to smiles and nods.
Officer Manuelito's face expressed unnaturally intense interest. Leaphorn and Chee looked merely embarrassed.
'But I gather no harm was done,' the professor added.
'I was just simplifying matters,' Sergeant Chee said.
'An item that might be useful as evidence was involved,' said Leaphorn, in an effort at damage control. 'Jim wanted to get it back in place without involving a lot of needless paperwork.'
'Oh,' said Louisa. 'Okay.' And noticed that Officer Manuelito was leaning forward, her face flushed, and that Jim Chee was looking remarkably tense, and that it was time to change the subject.
'By the way,' she said, 'one of our history professors specializes in American frontier, nineteenth century, and I made the mistake of asking him if he'd heard of the Golden Calf gold legend and that touched off a standard academic fifty-minute lecture.'
'Hey,' said Chee, 'I'd like to hear about that.'
'As I understand it, the recorded facts are that a civilian quartermaster employee at Fort Wingate, a man named Theodore Mott, was sent with four soldiers to deliver some supplies to the camp where they were building Fort Defiance. The soldiers were detached to join the cavalry unit at Defiance. Mott came back alone and resigned from his job. There's paperwork for that much in the army records. The interesting part is just talk about him finding a gold deposit on his trip.'
Louisa paused. Bernie leaned forward again. Chee said: 'Go ahead. This is going to be the interesting part.'
'The legend is that Mott came back with a sack of placer gold. Several thousand dollars worth of it, very big money those days. He's supposed to have told a tale of having to detour going to Fort Defiance to avoid a band of Navajos who looked hostile. It was early summer after a wet winter—and the snowy winter is also recorded. They did an overnight camp in a canyon carrying runoff water. Mott did some placer mining with a frying pan and liked what he saw in the sand. On the way back, alone now, he stopped again and—the way he told it—collected the sack of gold between sundown and dark and the higher he got up the canyon, the richer the sand. When he awakened the next morning, six Navajos were standing around him. He said their leader was a shaman and while none of the Navajos could speak English, he knew enough Navajo words to know the shaman was telling him this canyon was a sacred place and being there for him was taboo, and if he came back again they would kill him.'
The waiter was hovering, waiting to hand them their menus and to take their drink orders. Louisa paused while the group did their duty.
Bernie leaned forward, opened her mouth, said: 'I'd like to know—'
'Yes,' said Chee. 'What happened next? Did he leave?'
'There's a sort of vague reference in Fort Wingate military records of Mott asking a military escort for a project, and the request being denied. But apparently he got three other men to join him and they left with pack animals, telling people they were going to be prospecting down in the Zuni Mountains. Later one of the men came back to Wingate. He left a bunch of letters Mott had written to people at the fort to be mailed, and, according to the story, he turned in a substantial amount of placer gold at the assayer's office, and bought supplies, and headed out again.' She threw up her hands. 'That's the end of it. No one ever saw Mott or any of his partners again.'
'Sounds a little like the story about the Lost Adams diggings,' Leaphorn said.
'Killed by us savages,' Chee said.
Bernie said: 'I'd like to hear more about that tobacco tin.'
Chee said: 'Ah, well…'
Silence ensued.
Leaphorn cleared his throat.
'It seems a tobacco tin had been taken from the site where Mr. Doherty's body was found,' said Leaphorn. 'Later the officer in charge discovered the sand in this can contained a bit of placer gold and reported it. Sergeant Chee asked me to help devise a way to get it back where it had been and make sure the Federal Bureau of Investigation folks would find it there.' He paused, glanced nervously at Bernie, cleared his throat. 'That was accomplished. No harm done. No big deal.'
Silence descended again on the table.
'I've always enjoyed this drive up here from Gallup,' Louisa said. 'When we pass that old volcanic throat east of the highway, Joe always tells me stories about it being a meeting place for skinwalkers. Where they held their initiation ceremonies.'
'She's a very patient lady,' Leaphorn said, nodding to Louisa. 'I think she should have those tales memorized by now.'
