Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 03] by Listening Woman [txt] Page A

Fourth World isn’t supposed to end like the Third World did, with Water Monster making a flood. This time the evil is supposed to cause the Sun Father to make it cold, and the Dinee are supposed to hole up somewhere over in the Chuska range. I think Beautiful Mountain opens up for them. Then when the time is just right, they do this Sun Way and call back the light and warmth, and they start the Fifth World.”
    “I never heard a version quite like that,” Leaphorn said. “Like I said, maybe it’s bullshit. But there’s a point. There is a point. The way the old story goes, Standing Medicine figured this Way was the most important ceremonial of all.
    And he figured Kit Carson and the soldiers were going to catch him, and he was afraid the ritual would be forgotten, so …” Mcginnis sipped again, watching Leaphorn, timing his account. “So he found a place and somehow or other in some magic way he preserved it all.
    And he just told his oldest son, so that Kit Carson and the Belacani soldiers wouldn’t find it and so the Utes wouldn’t find it and spoil it.”
    “Interesting,” Leaphorn said. “Hold on. We ain’t got to the interesting part yet,” Mcginnis said. “What’s interesting is that Standing Medicine’s son came back from the Long Walk, and married a woman in the Mud clan, and this feller’s oldest son was a man named Mustache Tsossie, and he married back into the Salt Cedar clan, and his oldest boy turned out to be the one we called Hosteen Tso.”
    “So maybe that’s the secret,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe so. Or like I said, maybe it’s all Navajo bullshit.” Mcginnis’s expression was carefully neutral. “And part of the secret would be where this place was where Standing Medicine preserved the Sun Way,” Leaphorn said. “Any guesses?”
    “My God,” Mcginnis said. “It’s magic. And magic could be up in the sky, or under the earth. Out in that canyon country it could be anywhere.”
    “It’s been my experience,” Leaphorn said, “that secrets are hard to keep. If fathers know and sons know, pretty soon other people know.”
    “You’re forgetting something,” Mcginnis said.
    “Lot of these people around here are Utes, or half Utes. Lot of intermarrying. You got to think about how a die-hard old-timer like Hosteen Tso, and his folks before him, would feel about that. That sort of makes people close-mouthed about secrets.” Leaphorn thought about it. “Yeah,” he said. “I see what you mean.” The Utes had always raided this corner of the reservation. And when Kit Carson and the army had come, Ute scouts had led them—betraying hiding places, revealing food caches, helping hunt down the starving Dinee.
    Standing Medicine would have been guarding his secret as much from the Utes as from the whites—and now the Utes had married into the clans. “Even if we knew what it was and where it is, it wouldn’t help anyway,” Mcginnis said. “You probably got an old medicine bundle and some Yei masks and amulets hidden away somewhere. It’s not the kind of stuff anybody kills you for.”
    “Not even if it’s the way to stop the world from ending?” Leaphorn asked. Mcginnis looked at him, saw he was smiling. “That’s what you birds got to do, you know,” Mcginnis said. “If you’re going to solve that Tso killing, you got to figure the reason for it.” Mcginnis stared into the glass.
    “It’s a damn funny thing to think about,” he said. “You can just see it. Somebody walking up that wagon track, and the old man and that Atcitty girl standing there watching him coming, and probably saying “Ya-ta-hey” whether it was friend or stranger, and then this feller taking a gun barrel or something, and clouting the old man with it and then running the girl down and clubbing her, and then …”
    Mcginnis shook his head in disbelief. “And then just turning right around and walking right up that wagon track away from there.”
    Mcginnis stared over the glass at