Leaphorn squatted under the lowering roof, moving forward. He advanced on hands and knees. Finally, he crawled. The angle between floor and ceiling narrowed everywhere to nothing. Leaphorn let his forehead rest against the calcite, fighting off the first nudgings of panic. How much longer would the flashlight last? It was a subject he hadn’t allowed himself to consider. He moved the tip of his nose through the film of gritty dust and was reassured. His reason told him this sandy stuff must have been carried in from the outside-from the world of light. But here in this cul-de-sac there was no air movement. He began crawling backward. He would find the moving air again and try to follow it.
But the air current was dying. At first Leaphorn thought he had simply been unable to find the area through which it moved. And then he realized that it must be nearing that time of day when this earthly breathing stops the moment near the mar-gin of daylight and dark when the heating/cooling process briefly reaches balance, when warm air no longer presses upward and cool air is not yet heavy enough to sink. Even in this slanting cavern, where narrowness of passageway multiplied the effect, there would be two periods, morning and evening when the draft would be dead.
Leaphorn collected a pinch of the fine-grained sand between thumb and forefinger and sifted it out into the beam of his flashlight. It fell almost perpendicularly. Almost but not quite. Leaphorn moved toward the source of air, repeating the process. And the fifth time he bent to replenish his supply of dust, he saw the footprint of the dog.
He squatted, looking at the print and digesting what it meant. It meant, first, that he was not doomed to die entombed in this cave. The dog had found a way in. Leaphorn could find a way out. It meant, second, that the cavity Leaphorn had been following down from high up the cliff must be connected to a cavern that opened on the canyon bottom. As the thought came, Leaphorn flicked off the flashlight. If the dog had been in this cave, it was probably the hiding place of Goldrims.
Even though he now used the flashlight only cautiously, following the dogs tracks was relatively easy. The animal had roamed through a labyrinth of rooms and corridors, but had quickly exhausted its curiosity.
At about 8 P.M. Leaphorn detected a dim reflection of light. Exulting in the sight, he moved toward it slowly, stopping often to listen. He had a single advantage and he intended to guard it: Goldrims and Tull believed he was dead and out of the game. As long as they didn’t know he was inside their sanctuary, he had surprise on his side. He became aware of sounds now. First there was a vague purring, which began suddenly and stopped just as abruptly about five minutes later. It sounded like a small, well-muffled internal-combustion engine. A little later Leaphorn heard a metallic clatter, and after that, when he had edged perhaps a hundred yards toward the source of light, a thumping noise. The light was general now. Still faint but enough so that Leaphorn his pupils totally dilated by hours of absolute darkness could forgo the flashlight entirely. He moved past one of the seemingly endless screens of stalagmites into another of the series of auditorium-sized cavities which water seepage had produced at this level. Just around the screen, Leaphorn stopped. The light here reflected and shimmered from the irregular ceiling far overhead. At the end of this room, he could see water. He edged toward it. An underground pool. Its surface was about three feet lower than the old calcite deposit which formed the cavern floor. He knelt beside it and dipped in a finger. It was cool, but not cold.
He tasted it. Fresh, with none of the alkaline flavor he had expected. He looked down its surface, toward the source of light. And then he realized that this water must be part of Lake Powell backing into the cave as the lake surface rose with spring runoff and draining out as the level fell with autumn and winter. He drank thirstily.
The dog tracks led Leaphorn away from the water into the next room. At its far end, Leaphorn saw, it, too, opened onto the lake surface. The light here was still indirect seemingly reflecting out of the water but it was brighter. There were sounds, blurred by echoes. Voices. Whose? Goldrims and Tull? Father Goldrims and Theodora Adams? And how had a doctors daughter and a Franciscan priest become involved in this violent affair?
He thought of the face of Father Tso as it had looked magnified through binoculars-the eyes intent on the elevated host, the expression rapt. And the face in the reflected glow of the flashlight at the canyon bottom the man in the gold-rimmed glasses calmly discussing with Tull how to burn Leaphorn to death. Had his eyes tricked him in the flickering light?
Could they be the same man?
The hunger cramps which had bothered him earlier were gone now. He hadn’t eaten for thirty-three hours and his digestive system seemed to have adjusted to the oddity. He felt only a sort of lethargic weakness the product, he guessed, of low blood sugar. An intermittent throbbing had joined the ache in his hip-probably the symptom of an infection beginning in the dog bite. That was something he could think about much later. Now the problem was to find a way out of here.
As he thought that, a beam of yellow light flashed across his face.
Before Leaphorn could react, the light was gone. He stood looking frantically for a place to hide. And then he realized that whoever was behind the light apparently hadn’t noticed him. He could see the light only indirectly now, reflecting off the limestone far down the cavern. It swung and bobbed with the movement of the person who carried it. Leaphorn moved toward it as swiftly as he could without risking noise.
The flat calcite floor deposit quickly gave way to rougher going a mixture of stalagmite deposits jutting upward and outcrops of some sort of darker non-limestone extrusions which had resisted the dissolving water. The light disappeared, then its reflection appeared again between a high ridge of lime deposit and the cavern ceiling. Leaphorn climbed the ridge gingerly. He peered over the top. Below him, a thin man wearing a blue shirt and a red sweatband around his forehead was squatting beside a pile of cartons, gathering an armload of boxes and cans. The man rose and turned. He clutched his burden to his chest with his right arm, awkwardly retrieved an electric lantern with his left, and walked quickly from Leaphorns view the same way he had come. The bobbing light of his lantern faded away. Leaphorn lay a moment, listening. Then he slid over the limestone barrier and climbed quietly down to the boxes.
They contained groceries canned vegetables, canned meats, cartons of crackers and cookies, pork and beans, canned peaches. Sufficient, Leaphorn guessed, to feed a family for a month. He made a quick estimate of the missing cans and boxes. About enough gone to amount to thirty or forty man-days of eating. Either this cave had been occupied by one person a month or more, or by several persons for a shorter period. Near the cache of groceries was a row of five-gallon gasoline cans. Eight of them. Leaphorn checked. Five were full of gasoline and three were empty. Beyond them was a wooden crate. The word explosives was stenciled across the loosened lid. Leaphorn lifted it and looked inside. Dynamite sticks, neatly packed. Six of the twenty-four sticks were missing.