Hour of the Hunter by J. A. Jance

assistant in the English Department at the U. of O.
    During that time she, too, had admired Gary Ladd, but only from a far.
    For one thing, she had convinced herself that someone from Joseph, Oregon, could never be in Gary Ladd's league. For another, he was a graduate student while she was only a lowly sophomore.
    He looked at her now with his tanned brow furrowed into a puzzled frown.
    "Why didn't you go home when everybody else did?"
    "I'm working," she said. "At least I'm trying to work.
    I've got this whole stack of papers to deliver, but the door to the office is locked. Do you have a key? Where'd everybody go?"
    Gary Ladd reached into a jacket pocket, extracted a key ring, then took two steps down the hallway before stopping and turning on Diana.
    "Nobody told you, did they?"
    "Told me what?" she returned. "I've been in the ditto room. When I came out, everything was closed up. Even the classrooms are empty.
    What's going on?"
    "Somebody shot President Kennedy."
    "No!"
    The very idea was incredible, unthinkable. Assassinations happened in other parts of the world-wild, terrible, jungle-filled places like South America or Africa--but not here in the good old U.S. of A.
    "Where?" she managed to slammer. "When?"
    "This morning. In Dallas. They already caught the guy who did it?"
    "Is he all right?"
    Garrison Ladd looked mystified. "He's fine. They've got him in jail."
    "No, not him. I mean President Kennedy. Is he all right?"
    Gary Ladd shook his head, while his gray-blue eyes darkened in sympathy.
    "He's dead, Diana. President Kennedy is dead. They just swore in LBJ on the plane headed back to Washington. Come on. Let's go drop off your papers.
    They must be heavy."
    An Indian Health Services nurse hovered over Rita's bed-bound form, but the old woman's mind was far away in another time and place.
    Dancing Quail hid behind her mother's skirts as the horse-drawn wagon pulled up beside the low-slung adobe house. It was the end of Shopol Eshabig Mashad, the short planting month. For days the children of Ban Thak had worried that soon Big Eddie Lopez, the tribal policeman, would come to take many of them away to boarding school.
    Seven-year-old Dancing Quail didn't want to leave home.
    She didn't want to go to school. Some of the other children had told her about it, about how they weren't allowed to speak to their friends in their own language, about how they had to dress up in stiff, uncomfortable clothing.
    Her parents had argued about school. Alice Antone, who sometimes worked for the sisters at Topawa, maintained that education was important.
    Joseph Antone disagreed, taking the more traditional view that all his daughter really needed to know was how to cook beans and make tortillas, how to carry water and make baskets-skills she would learn at home with her mother and grandmother and not at the boarding school in Phoenix.
    But when Big Eddie's horse plodded into Ban Thak, Joseph Antone was miles away working in the floodplain fields. Big Eddie came over to the open fire where Alice stirred beans in a handmade pottery crock.
    He wiped the sweat from his face. "It sure is hot," he said. "Where is your husband?"
    "Gan," Alice said, nodding toward the fields. "Over there."
    :'Will he be home soon?" Big Eddie asked.
    'No," she answered. "Not soon."
    "I have come for the children," Big Eddie announced.
    "To take them to Chuk Shon to catch the train."
    Dancing Quail had been to Tucson once with her mother and had found the town noisy and frightening. They had gone to sell her grandmother's ollas-heavy, narrownecked pottery crocks that kept water sweet and cool even through the heat of the summer. Alice had walked the dusty streets carrying a burden basket piled high with ollas, while Dancing Quail had trailed along behind. Once home in Ban Thak, the child had not asked to go again.
    Quietly now, Dancing Quail attempted to slip away, but Alice stopped her. "Ni-niad. Daughter, come back. Go quickly and get your other dress. You