Free Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 01] by jpg] The Blessing Way (v1) [html Page A

about this. I know you have never listened to gossip but I will tell you something you might need to know for your Sing. This man Horseman is dead now, and if he was the witch, you might need to know about it for the way you hold the Sing."
    Sandoval wondered why the policeman thought a man named Horseman was the witch. The question would come now. Maybe it would tell him.
    "As I said, I am ignorant about many things. I know it would be easier to cure Tsosie if the witch was already dead. But how would be the best way to kill the witch?"
    Sandoval turned the question over carefully.
    "The best way is with clubs."
    The policeman was looking at him closely now. "Would it be a good thing to smother him? To pour sand over his head?"
    "I never heard that. Sometimes with clubs and sometimes they shoot them." Sandoval was puzzled. He had never heard of Horseman and he had never heard of a man being killed like that. He saw Tsosie was coming back now from behind the brush shelter and he got to his feet. His bones felt stiff and he was irritated. He suspected the young man had left the Navajo Way and was on the Jesus Road.
    "My grandson, I must go back into the hogan now. But now I have a question for you to answer. Tell me if you believe in witching."
    "My father taught me about it," the policeman said. "When the water rose in the Fourth World and the Holy People emerged through the hollow reed, First Man and First Woman came up, too. But they forgot witchcraft and so they sent Diving Heron back for it. They told him to bring out 'the way to get rich' so the Holy People wouldn't know what he was getting. And Heron brought it out and gave it to First Man and First Woman and they gave some of it to Snake. But Snake couldn't swallow it so he had to hold it in his mouth. And that's why it kills you when a snake strikes you."
    The words were right, Sandoval thought, but he recited them like a lesson.
    "You didn't tell me whether you believe it."
    The man named Leaphorn smiled very slightly.
    "My grandfather," he said, "I have learned to believe in evil."
    Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn had returned to his carryall intending to get some sleep. He had left Window Rock a little after midnight to drive to the Tsosie place. But the track over the slick rock country had been even worse than he remembered and the two hours' rest he had hoped to have when he arrived had been used in low-gear driving over the great waste of eroded slopes west of the Lukachukais. Now he had time. He had learned nothing positive from Sandoval. He had asked around and learned that Billy Nez was not yet here. There was nothing to do but wait. The sun, now rising, would have to be halfway up the sky before it was time for the Encounter Between the Camps and then there would be the exchange of gifts and other ritual before the scalp shooting could be held. He leaned back against the seat, feeling exhausted but wide awake. He found himself again retracing all he knew of Luis Horseman, again examining each assorted fact for some semblance of pattern.
    The file on Luis Horseman at Window Rock had been typical of those for the relatively few young men who gave Law and Order the bulk of its business. A few scattered years of schooling on the Reservation, arrests at Gallup and Farmington and Tuba City for drunk and disorderly, beginning when he was seventeen. Short-term jobs on the Santa Fe railroad maintenance crews and at the strip mine. A marriage into the Minnie Tso family, a fight, a six-month term in the tribal jail for aggravated assault, and then the knifing at Gallup and the stolen car. All that was familiar enough. Too familiar.
    "He acted like he had no relatives," Leaphorn thought and grinned wryly at the old-fashioned expression. When he was a boy, it was the worst thing his mother could say about anyone. But then the Navajo Way made the relatives totally responsible for anything one of the family did. Now that was changing and there were more young men like Horseman.