Lincoln raised his eyes to watch the departing light. There in his line of vision was a nest of cactus, three or four in an almost straight line. Lincoln stepped slightly to the left, and now the cactus was in a straight line.
And something was fluttering from the arm of one of them.
"Ha!"
Just as the sun dipped below the west, Lincoln tore the piece of paper, which had been speared on one of the cactus's pricks, and held it out to read. In the glow of twilight, he slowly made out the words, reading them aloud in the way Thomas had first taught him to read:
DUE WEST ELEVEN MILES, THEN DUE SOUTH THREE. MEET YOU AT THE BASE OF KITT PEAK 2/14. WILL WAIT. MULLIN.
"Ha!"
Lincoln shouted, and this time was filled with pride for his accomplishment, small as it had been. He also felt sure that this area was secure, or Thomas would not have let him stay here on his own.
So something important had happened, and Thomas had gone off in search of it.
And tomorrow he would meet up with his old friend.
Washed in relief, Lincoln broke down his
saddlebags and made a simple camp. In a little
while, a small fire was crackling, and Lincoln was finishing the remains of canned beans, sitting on his bedroll. It was just like the old days.
In the night, old desert sounds returned to him, and he felt at home.
With only a little guilt, Lincoln remembered that he had forgotten to send that telegram, and that there would be hell to pay from Matty when he got back to his real home.
Under the stretching, infinite, pale blue bowl of the desert sky, Thomas Mullin felt liberated. His mind had not been clearer in years. He thought of Sherlock Holmes, entrenched in his stuffy chambers at 221B Baker Street, and wondered how Conan Doyle could ever fool his readers into thinking Holmes could solve anything. Wreathed in pipe smoke, hemmed in by claustrophobia, Thomas knew that he himself would merely go mad.
But to each his own.
Two days in the saddle, and he already felt ten years younger. Boston seemed like a bad dream now, a nightmare interlude in what had been a life of action. A man makes his own world, Thomas decided; starting from inside his head and working his way out to the physical world. For Holmes, his stuffy apartments were merely the props that made his inner world comfortable; for Thomas himself, the wide expanse of the desert made his mind sharp and content. It was something he had never realized; and he knew now that he would never return to the life he had been leading in Boston. For him, this infinite sky and dry dust of land was the key to his youth of mind and his mental health.
Murphy's warnings to take care had so far proved needless. The two men he had met, one white, one Indian, had proven friendly and unheedful of his color. The white man had, indeed, been a former army scout, and after introductions, he and Thomas had quickly fallen to swapping names and postings. It had turned out they had at least five friends in common, two retired, the other three still active in northwest duty. And they both shared similar concerns about Theodore Roosevelt.
The Indian had proved less chummy, but more useful as far as Thomas's present task was concerned. He not only knew the surveyor, Tahini, but knew where to find him. They worked for the same mining concern, and the Indian, named Kohono-si, had provided Thomas with exact directions. It would only take another half-day's ride to reach the spot where Tahini was presently working.
When Thomas had thanked Kohono-si for the information, the man had merely grunted and said, "If you go there, be guarded. I told Tahini this, too."
"What do you mean?" Thomas had asked, but Kohono-si had merely grunted again, mounted his horse, and ridden in the opposite direction.
As the ride would bring Thomas into night-fall, he was faced with a dilemma. Since he had originally thought Tahini would be in the area he had written Reeves about, he had the option of waiting for Lincoln or riding on ahead. Though filled with impatience, he had decided to be fair and wait for the young man. He didn't quite admit to himself that he wanted his young Watson's company, which was true.
But Kohono-si had changed his mind. A half hour after Thomas himself had reached the cactus-ridden spot of their meeting, the Indian had ridden up, stopped his horse, and stood staring down at Thomas.
"Something wrong?" Thomas had asked. The Indian looked troubled, yet unwilling to speak.
"You wouldn't be here if you didn't have something to tell me."
"You are the man who fought Pretorio," Kohono-si said solemnly.
"That's right," Thomas said. It occurred to him that his mount was ten feet away, with his rifle in its sling.
"I salute you for that," Kohono-si said. When nothing else was forthcoming, Thomas said, "Thank you."
Kohono-si still seemed to be battling himself. He looked off to the mountains in the near distance. "Pretorio was a bad chief, and his braves killed many of the Tohono O'otam."
"I know that. He killed many braves of many tribes."
Kohono-si grunted. Continuing to look off toward the mountains, he said, "But he is dead, and this is today. Because you are a friend of the Tohono O'otam, I want to warn you that the eagle is in the sacred mountain. The eagle is angry with the Tohono O'otam."
Now he finally looked at Thomas. "Be careful of the eagle. He resides in the sacred mountain, Oto-A-Pe, the one you call Kitt Peak. Do not anger the eagle."
Thomas scratched his chin and said, slowly, "Kohono-si, are the Tohono O'otam going on the warpath?"
Kohono-si looked away, toward the mountains. "This I cannot say. But I know the eagle is angry with Tahini. Tahini was to be on the Council of Elders, and he shunned this for the white man's job and liquor. The eagle is angry."
"Kohono-si, is the white man named Adams near where Tahini is working?"
"This is all I will say."
With that, the brave turned and rode away. Thomas, analyzing the conversation, quickly left Lincoln Reeves a message and set out toward the spot where Tahini would be.
With a hard ride, Thomas still reached the area after nightfall. It was too late to do anything, so he made camp in a secure place, covered on three sides by rock outcroppings. He made a small fire and ate his dinner. Then he read by firelight for a while, a dog-eared copy of the
Strand
magazine containing an old Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches." He knew the story nearly by heart, and found his mind wandering away from it to stare at the drawings accompanying it.
He was thinking about Bill Adams. There was more to this story than Adams had let on. Though it was obvious that Adams cared for his daughter, in the years Thomas had known the man, he had only spoken of her three or four times. Once he had even referred to her as a 'half-breed.' That didn't preclude his love for her, but Adams's reaction to her going back to her natural home could not be the whole story.
And there was something eerie about this place. Thomas recalled the feeling he had had once, in the Davis Mountains, when the cry of a deranged man had led him, briefly, to superstitious thoughts. Then, he had berated himself for those thoughts, because they were something Holmes would never feel. And though in the end the superstitions had turned out to be based all too much on reality, to this day the tinge of mysticism itself, he was convinced, had been something tangible. Holmes would not agree; to that rapier-like mind, everything could be reduced to the everyday; but Thomas was not so sure that things were so black and white. Was there an afterlife? He didn't know, and didn't much care. The question was, was reality a wider concept than Sherlock Holmes would be willing to accept? Were the boundaries of the real world wider, and softer at the edges, than the great fictional detective would admit? Though the Hound of the Baskervilles had turned out to be nothing more than a poor, starved animal, was there something to the feelings the beast had engendered in those he had frightened so terribly?
Thomas didn't know. But he was determined to keep an open mind.
And that feeling was with him again.
Analyze it,
he thought.
Let it fill your mind, and pick it apart, and see what it is.
He put down his magazine, and closed his eyes. His ears were sharp, his fingers so sensitive that the merest desert breeze tingled across them. He heard no cry of eagles, no cry of a deranged man, even, but still, there was something there, something tilted at the edge of the world... .
Bah.
He opened his eyes, and decided that unless he could feel this thing, grasp it tightly with his own hands, it would remain to him only a vague concept. Holmes's way, the way that Thomas led most of his life, might very well be closer to the truth.
He turned, saw the outline of a prone human body not four feet from where he had left his horse.
Momentarily, a chill rose up his back, but he suppressed it.
He rose and approached the body. An Indian lay face down at the base of one of the rocks hemming in Thomas's camp. The arms were outstretched. In the flicker of firelight, Thomas could see vague lines running up the arms toward the hands.
He bent closer.
The lines were scratches; on closer examination, deep gashes.
Rummaging for a stick, Thomas bent closer and hooked the man's sleeve up. The gashes stopped near the elbow line.
The man's face was turned away from him. Thomas climbed over the body and bent close. Cursing at the bad light, he ran back to the fire and fed it with kindling until it burned brighter. Then he returned to the body.
The face was marked with gashes, also.
Carefully, touching only clothing, Thomas turned the body over.
The front of the Indian's tunic was covered with deep cuts. So were the palms of the hands. He had tried to ward off his attacker until he had fallen. Most of the work had then been done on the chest, deep slicing cuts that had gutted and bled the body. They were not the sharp strokes of a knife blade, however, but wider, more ragged.
Thomas rose, fed the fire again, and examined the area around the body.
Nearby, knocked over, was a surveying instrument, its lenses shattered. There was no sign of a horse or saddlebags, but Thomas did find, near the base of the rocks, two liquor bottles, one empty, one nearly so, different brands.
Two bottles.
Thomas thought it unlikely that this one man, Tahini, he assumed, had consumed nearly two bottles of liquor. That alone would have killed him. Which meant there had been someone else with him.
Thomas recalled Murphy's information that Tahini and Bill Adams were friends.
Alive with the scent now, Thomas returned
to the fire and fed it every scrap of bush, weed, and stunted tree he could find, until it roared dangerously high. He kicked his copy of the
Strand
back just as flames were licking at it, and kicked his bedroll back away from the blaze, also.
He returned to the base of rocks. Climbing atop the lowest rock shelf, he examined the area around him. A series of rock shelves led up to a low ridge, which flattened out and gently sloped down to the desert floor. At the edge of the rock shelf, overlooking the spot where he had found Tahini, were scratches on the rock.
He examined the cracks around the rocks, found nothing.
Scrambling down to the desert floor, he looked into the shallow cuts formed by butting rocks, starting at one end and working his way down to the other. Where he could not see, he first poked in with a stick, to ward off snakes, then felt around with his hand.
Near the far side, after scaring a copperhead off, his hand reached between two close-butted rocks, and felt cloth.
He rose, and felt around the edge of the facing rock. It had been fitted into place.
Grunting with effort, he tried to pry it back, then discovered that it could be rolled aside.
Inside, swaddled in blankets, was a body.
He knew even before uncovering it that it was Bill Adams. Logic told him that it was. But the shock of seeing his old friend frozen in death, a grimace of horror on his face, still sent Thomas staggering back to gain a breath of air. Quickly, though, he reentered the shallow cave and dragged the body out.
There were no outward marks on Adams. So the two men had been killed in different ways.
Leaving Adams's body, Thomas went back to his search.
He found nothing else in the shallow cave, but found what he was looking for a few yards to the right of it. A tobacco pouch that he himself had given Bill on his fiftieth birthday. It had the initials W.A. burned into the leather.
Moving close to the fire, Thomas bent to the ground and opened the pouch up.
There was no tobacco inside. He turned the pouch over and nothing fell out, but, feeling down with his fingers, there was something adhering to the bottom.
He turned the pouch inside out, and a small, grayish, mushroom-shaped button fell to the desert floor.