He shrugged. Strange it might be, but not very important. It could have been hit by a car or truck out on the road and then brought in here to be disposed of. He turned away and started back to the car, idly watching the ground for tracks. He’d taken only a few steps when he saw the piece of metal. He picked it up. It was a small aluminum cap, and even as the tingle of excitement began to spread along his nerves, he saw the other thing on the ground—a thin slice of wood veneer the same length as one of the Upmann cigars. It was flat now instead of curled, and somewhat bleached by the sun, but there was no doubt what it was.
What in God’s name had the old man been doing out here by the carcass of a burro—assuming the carcass had been here then? And where was the tube itself? He began a search then, slowly, systematically, covering every inch of the ground in a widening spiral outward from the burro. Several times he saw heel prints, but the ground was too hard to tell whether they were all made by the same pair of shoes. The sun beat down relentlessly, and the smell was disagreeable until he began to get farther away. It was obvious now the burro hadn’t been dragged in here or unloaded from a truck because no vehicle had been near the place at all, but this interested him only slightly at the moment. It was a full ten minutes before he found anything else, and then it wasn’t the cigar tube—he already knew he wasn’t going to find that, and why.
It was a small strip of brown plastic or wax-impregnated cardboard a little more than an inch long and varying from a half inch to an inch in width, jagged of outline and looking as if it had been scorched. It was slightly curved as though it had once been part of a cylinder, and it was crimped at one end. The only images he could evoke from this much of it were of a shotgun shell or a stick of dynamite, but it couldn’t be either of these because of the markings. At one end, where it had apparently been crimped, was a plus sign, and at the other, where it was torn and scorched, the two lower-case letters: fd. Was there a word in the English language that ended in fd? He couldn’t think of one, and if he’d ever seen anything resembling this, he couldn’t remember it. He put it in the pocket of his shirt.
The three beer cans made even less sense. He found them as he was completing his last circuit, now a good fifty yards away from the burro. They were almost that far again beyond him, toward the house, but sunlight glinting off one of them caught his eye and he went over. They were shiny and new, emptied only recently, and were strung together with short lengths of soft copper wire as if somebody had fashioned a homemade toy for some toddler to drag around. He pulled them from the clump of sage in which they were caught, looked at them blankly, and shook his head.
Their being linked together with the wire seemed too pointless even for speculation, and their only significance was the proof that there had indeed been people here within the past few weeks and that, contrary to the evidence so far, they weren’t a new species of man subsisting off the surrounding air in the manner of lichens and orchids, both of which he’d already established when he found the cap to the cigar tube. He tossed them back into the bush, went out to the car, savagely turned it around, and drove back to the house. There were only two possibilities. Either they’d carried everything away with them, in which case he was out of luck, or they’d disposed of it farther from the house, possibly by burning or burying.
He parked in the shade of one of the trees in the rear yard and went straight back, carrying the binoculars. At first the ground was flat, sparsely covered with sage, but after about two hundred yards it rose in a series of low benches, cut here and there by ravines. He climbed up and turned to survey the flat, sweeping the glasses slowly back and forth over all the ground between there and the house. Nothing. He went on, following the course of one of the twisting ravines for several hundred yards, crossed it, and worked his way back down another. The sun was blistering, and sweat ran down his face. Thirst began to bother him, and he wished he’d taken a drink of the water before he started. A jackrabbit burst out of a clump of sage and went bounding off. Heat waves shimmered off the rocky ridge just beyond him to the north. It was a half hour later, and he was a good quarter mile from the house when he found it.
A steep-sided gully about twelve feet deep led off from one of the ravines, and at the bottom of it, half-covered with dead tumbleweeds, were the remains of a fire and a heap of blackened tin cans and broken bottles. He backtracked, found a place to climb down into the ravine, and followed it up to its steep-sided tributary. He entered it, feeling the brutal heat within its constricting walls, and smashed and shoved the old tumbleweeds out of the way.
He found a short piece of stick left over from the fire and began to probe carefully through the pile, separating and cataloging its contents. The labels were all burned off the cans, of course, but at least a dozen of them were food tins—the tops removed completely with a mechanical can opener—in addition to seven fruit-juice tins—punched—and forty-five beer cans. He paused, baffled, as he was tossing the beer cans to one side. Nine of them were tied together with short lengths of copper wire, three in one string and six in another, the same as the ones he’d found out in the flat.
He shrugged and threw them behind him. He could puzzle over that later. There were a number of battered aluminum trays that presumably had held frozen food of some kind, a mustard jar and a pickle jar, both unbroken, and the pieces of what appeared to be two whiskey bottles. Next was a large buckle. It was fire-blackened, and whatever had been attached to it was completely burned away. Then he poked out a short length of stranded copper wire, its insulation burned off. Then another buckle, the same size and shape as the first, and several more scraps of wire, and finally, at the bottom of the whole thing, he began to uncover the cigar tubes he’d been certain he would find. Some of them were flattened and bent and all were scorched by the fire, but there was no doubt they were Upmanns. On a few of them part of the name was still legible. There were twenty-three of them. He tossed the stick aside and stood up.
There was no way of knowing how many people had been here or whether some of the others had been smoking the cigars as well as his father, but even so they could have remained four or five days with the amount of supplies they’d used. They’d obviously had camping equipment, including an icebox and a stove of some kind, and it was possible the heavier vehicle had been a pickup camper. There was little or no chance anybody had seen them while they were in here, since the place was out of sight of the road, but somebody might have seen them coming or going. The thing to do now was report it to Brubaker as soon as possible so he could start questioning the people who used the road. He went back and climbed out of the ravine. Sweat was pouring off his face, and his shirt was stuck to him all over.
He started toward the house but had taken only a few steps when he stopped abruptly, looking out over the flat beyond it. A plume of dust had appeared over the rise just this side of the gate, and the vehicle at the head of it was coming this way in a hurry. He jumped down into the edge of the ravine and lifted the binoculars from their strap around his neck. It was a sports car. It disappeared from view behind the trees before he could get more than this brief glimpse of it, but his eyes were coldly watchful as he waited for it to come into view in the yard at the side of the house. It did in a little more than a minute, and even as it came to a sliding stop, he saw it was Bonner’s Porsche.