Free Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 02] by jpg] Dance Hall Of The Dead (v1[1].0) [html

motion.
    He flicked on the flashlight. The door was formed of five vertical planks, braced with one-by-four-inch board. Under the yellow light it hung motionless. The wind gusted again, hooting through the hogan's stovepipe smoke hole and speaking in a quarrelsome chorus of voices around the cracks and crevices of its logs. Now the door moved. Outward, then inward, tapping against its latch.
    "Hello," Leaphorn shouted. "Shorty?" The wind voices of the hogan sank abruptly in pitch and volume, answering him with silence. Leaphorn moved beside the hogan wall. He pumped a shell into the 30-30 chamber, held the rifle on his right arm. With his left hand he pulled up the doorlatch and jerked outward. The wind helped, sucking the door open and banging it back against the log wall opposite Leaphorn.
    Inside nothing moved. The flashlight beam reflected from the galvanized tin of a washtub against the back wall, lit a scattered jumble of cooking pots and food supplies, and lingered on clothing (boy-sized bluejeans, three shirts, a nondescript blue cloth, assorted underwear) which hung from the hogan's blanket rope. Behind the clothing, shadows moved on the rough log wall. Anything there? Nothing visible. Leaphorn moved the light clockwise through the hogan. It passed three empty bedrolls, all in disarray, passed a battered metal chest with its drawers hanging open, passed a rope-tied bundle of sheep hides, and stopped finally on the arm of a man. The arm extended limply on the packed earthen floor, the dark wrist thrust out of a sleeve that was khaki (not dark blue), the fingers relaxed, their tips touching the earth.
    A stinging flurry of dry snowflakes whipped past Leaphorn's face. Again the wind spoke loud around the hogan, raising an obbligato mixture of hoots and shrieks. The flashlight now lit black hair—neatly parted, a braid tied with a string, a cloth headband which had been a faded pink but now was dyed—like the hair beneath it—a fresh bloody crimson.
    Without knowing it, Leaphorn had been holding his breath. Now that he had found Shorty Bowlegs, he released it with a sound something like a sigh. He stood for a moment looking carefully past the hogan, studying the dim, wind-twisted shapes of the piñons and junipers which surrounded it, examining the shape of the outbuildings. Listening. But the wind made listening useless.
    He stepped into the hogan and squatted on his heels. He stared first at the face that had been Bowlegs' and then examined the hogan. Shorty Bowlegs had been killed with a blow struck from behind with something heavy and sharp. The same weapon that had killed Cata? Swung by the figure in the blue shirt (a man, he thought, without knowing why he thought it) he had seen at the doorway. And where was that man now? Not more than five minutes away, but with wind, snow, dust, and darkness making both ears and eyes useless, he might as well be on another planet. Leaphorn cursed himself. He had seen this killer, and he had sat daydreaming in his truck while the man walked away.
    Leaphorn tested the blood on Bowlegs' hair with a tentative fingertip. Sticky. Bowlegs had been struck at least thirty minutes before Leaphorn's arrival. The killer had apparently killed Bowlegs first and then ransacked the hogan. Had he come to kill Bowlegs and, with that done, searched the family's belongings? Or had he come to make the search and killed Bowlegs to make it possible? To search for what? Everything that Bowlegs had accumulated in perhaps forty years of living was littered on the hogan floor. Add it together—the clothing, the supplies, the sheepherder's tools—and it might have cost five hundred dollars, new, at inflated trading post prices. Now it was worn, used. By whiteman's standards, Leaphorn thought, Bowlegs had a net worth of maybe one hundred dollars. The white world's measure of his life. And what would the Navajo measure be? The Dinee made a harder demand—that man find his place in the harmony of things.