glovebox, slid belly down onto the front floorboards, and pursued a close-up search there. The light and his probing hand harvested three business cards he'd missed (all from a State Farm Insurance salesman), a sock, another lost dime, what seemed to be a white marble but was actually a gum ball, a bright-red bead, and a small disk of clear glass that Leaphorn presumed at first was the lost face of a cheap watch.
He was wrong about that. When he held it up for in spection, he saw it was a lens. In fact, it was a progressive-focus lens prescribed and ground for those who need one focal length for reading, another for driving and other distances. Leaphorn slipped it into an envelope he saved from the trash, added the strands of hair, and sat awhile thinking. He was remembering one of the photographs on Wiley Denton's wall. Beautiful young Linda, her long blonde hair disheveled by the breeze, smiling at the photographer, wearing silver-rimmed glasses.
Chapter Twenty-Four
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Leaphorn gave Mrs. McKay the coins, showed her the lens he'd found, asked her if she or any of her friends wore such glasses, and when she could think of none, he avoided her obvious question by refusing to speculate and saying he'd try to find out. Then he showed her the sales slip from the hardware store.
'Any idea what these were for?'
'What's this,' Mrs. McKay said, peering at the slip. 'Is that 'crowbar'?'
'That's the way I read it.'
'We don't have one. I don't even know what it is.'
'It's a steel bar with a sort of hook end used for prying things,' Leaphorn said. 'How about the other items?'
'I can hardly believe it,' she said, and laughed. 'We have a drip under the sink. For months we had a drip, and Marvin said not to worry, he'd fix it. I guess he finally got around to it.' But as she tried to go on, her voice broke. She looked away. 'I mean, I guess he was going to.'
Leaphorn had intended to borrow Mrs. McKay's telephone to call home, but grief prefers privacy. He drove out to a motel parking lot on old U.S. 66 and called his Window Rock number from the pay phone. Louisa answered.
'Are you at Wiley Denton's house?' she asked.
'Not yet,' he said. 'That's my next stop.'
'He's in oil and gas leases, that sort of thing, isn't he? If he is, ask him if he knows anything about the ownership of Mock Land and Cattle Company or Apache Pipe.'
'What's up?' Leaphorn asked. 'I think that cattle company is Bill Mock's outfit. Or used to be. Probably owned by his heirs now. He operated a good-sized feedlot operation in Sandoval County, and a ranch.'
'Feedlot?'
'Where buyers fatten up range cattle before they send them off to become sirloins and hamburgers,' Leaphorn said. And Apache Pipe, I think that's Denton. Years ago, he went into it with the Jicarilla tribe to finance the gas- collection system for the gas wells, but I heard he bought out the tribe's interest.'
'Denton's,' said Louisa. 'How about that.'
'Tell me,' Leaphorn said.
'That land on top of Mesa de los Lobos is the typical Checkerboard Reservation jumble, which won't surprise you. Much of the north slope of the mesa is reserved Navajo land, and a lot of the south side was in the allocation the government gave to the railroad. Some of that somehow went back into public domain ownership—probably some swapping back and forth with private ownership, and you Navajos bought back a piece of it, and other chunks were sold off by the railroad to various private owners. I'll guess you knew a lot of that already.'
'Some of it,' Leaphorn said.
'The parcel I think you and Sergeant Chee might be interested in is a six-section block at the head of the Coyote Canyon drainage. Somebody named Arthur Sanders and Sons bought it from the outfit handling land sales for the railroad in 1878. That must have become Sanders Cattle, because in 1903 William L. Elrod bought it from them. Since then, there's two more transfers of title, looks like due to deaths and inheritances, but the company with the title to the six sections is still Elrod Land and Cattle Company. You got that?'
'I've got it,' Leaphorn said. 'I imagine Chee will want to find out if the Elrod people know what's going on down at the bottom end of their canyon. And thanks. This must have been a lot of hard work for you.'
'Hold it. Hold it,' Louisa said. 'I haven't got to the hard-work part yet, where it gets complicated.'
'Oh?'
'Elrod also has a grazing lease on a small tract of Bureau of Land Management land adjoining its property. There's some sort of legal question about whether that lease will be renewed. Argument over whether Elrod overgrazed it, I think it is. Anyway, Elrod dropped its application to renew on that, and the existing lease expires September one.'
'September one,' Leaphorn said. 'Couple more weeks to run then. Any significance to that?'
'I don't know, but maybe. There's an option to buy, contract to sell recorded, which is tied to the Bureau of Land Management lease. Effective when the lease expires. The clerk at the blm office said Apache would probably apply for the lease, but hasn't yet. She said the little tract is just a sort of cut-off corner, and she didn't think anyone else would want it.'
'The purchase price didn't happen to be on the record?'
'They never are,' Louisa said.
'Let's see,' Leaphorn said. 'Six sections at six hundred forty acres per section would be almost four thousand acres. With dry country grazing land close to worthless, I doubt if the price would matter to Denton.'
Louisa laughed. 'Not for raising cattle anyway. The blm was calculating you could graze eight units per square mile on it. I guess that's eight cows per section.'
