Gideon put down his glass. "Nate, forget about that part of it for a while. I want to ask you-"
"Forget about it!" he said in a strangled voice. With an effort he composed himself. "Want to ask me what?" he said calmly, then stifled a burp. "Pardon me," he said to Julie.
"Was another bone ever found up there on Stonebarrow? A femur?"
"No. No other bones. No femurs, no nothing. Why, what’s it to you?" He snickered vapidly, cleared his throat, and put on a serious expression again. "Who says there was a bone?"
"Leon Hillyer wrote up a find card on a partial femur."
"Leon Hillyer," Nate muttered with disgust, and then mumbled some more.
"Pardon?"
"I said," Nate enunciated loudly, "that he is too damn incompetent to fill in a find card correctly."
Gideon let that sink in for a few seconds. Then he said, "He strikes me as kind of bright. Didn’t he win a Grabow Award a few years ago?"
"Grabow Award," Nate grumbled. "He’s glick and he’s slib, that’s all he is."
"Pardon?" Gideon said again.
"I said, " Nate practically shouted, "that he is gl… slick and glib, that’s all. Wants to jump to grand conclusions without going through all the grubwork." He swallowed a long draught of the stout and studied the glass somberly. "Hell, who doesn’t? But that’s what archaeology is: recording and counting and sorting. And," he added with a fierce look at Julie, "housekeeping."
"I’m sure it is," Julie said politely.
"Damn right." Nate closed his eyes and seemed to doze.
The barmaid brought their Ploughman’s lunches: warm rolls, butter, big crumbly, blue-veined wedges of Stilton, pickled onions, tomato, and chutney. " ’Kew," she said. "You don’t suppose the gentleman wants another glass of stout?"
"I don’t think so," said Gideon.
"That’s good," she responded sensibly, and went away.
"What do we do now?" Julie asked.
"Eat, I guess, and let Nate enjoy his snooze. I’ll get him back to the Cormorant when we’re done. It’s only a couple of blocks."
Julie thoughtfully sliced into a large pickled onion. "Poor, poor man. Do you still believe he didn’t do it himself? Plant the skull, I mean?"
"Yes, I do. Even though Frawley says he did."
Nate had begun to snore softly. Gideon turned his own chair slightly away from him and cut off a section of cheese. He was extremely hungry. "The Stilton’s good, isn’t it?"
"Mmm, fabulous. I suppose you’re going back up to Stonebarrow Fell after lunch? No country walks today?"
"I think I’d better." He smiled and caressed the back of her hand with his fingertips. "Poor Julie. I’ve been ignoring you, haven’t I?"
"Oh, that’s okay; I know Abe needs you. You know what I’d really like to do, though?"
"Speak," Gideon managed, with his mouth full of roll and chutney, "and it’s yours."
"Do you remember that beautiful meadow on the way to Wootton Fitzpaine, where we sat on a log for a while?"
Gideon nodded. "Dyne Meadow."
"Uh-huh. Well, there’s a full moon tonight. I looked it up; it comes up at seven-oh-four. Wouldn’t it be lovely to go back there, sit on that log, and watch the moonrise? The sky’s clear and it’s not very cold. Am I being silly?"
"I think," Gideon said, "it sounds like a great idea. We’ll have dinner early and take along some brandy and a thermos of coffee."
Julie smiled and fell happily to her chutney.
"Grubwork," Nate announced startlingly, "and Hillyer thinks he’s too damn brilliant to be bothered with it. That’s his problem. Archaeology is ninety percent grubwork and ten percent brainwork." He inhaled noisily. "And fifty percent housework. Leon thinks it’s a hundred percent intell… intellectualization."
"Yes," Gideon said. "he told me that the two of you have had a few friendly arguments about that."
" Friendly arguments? " Astonished, Nate stared woozily at Julie. "You hear that? Friendly arguments! Ha, ha."
"They weren’t friendly?" Gideon asked.
" Un friendly arguments, that’s what they were. I told him last summer, back at Gelden, oh, yeah." He looked accusingly at his glass. "You bet I did."
"Told him what, Nate?"
"Told him," Nate said, "that unless he showed me on this dig that he was at least trying to learn how to do the grubwork, I wasn’t going to approve his dissertation, and I was going to recommend that he be fulnk…flunked out. And…and he hasn’t made one goddamn effort-not one. So’s gonna be good-bye, Leon. Ho, ho, ho."
"Wait a minute, Nate. You’re telling me Leon is flunking? "
"Damn right. I don’t give a damn how many Grabows he wins. Archaeology is ninety percent grubwork, eighty percent-"
"And he knows you’re flunking him?"
"Well… sure…"
"Leon Hillyer!" Gideon whispered fiercely. Why hadn’t it occurred to him before? Nate had practically leveled an accusing finger at Leon ten minutes ago-without knowing it, of course-and it had gone right by Gideon. He jumped up and went to the bar.
"Do you have any candy?"
The man behind the bar gestured to a rack of packaged candies near the cash register. "What’ll it be?"
Gideon pointed. "Those."
He handed over seven pence, took the candy, and went back to the table. Nate was hectoring Julie.
"Grubwork! Grubwork, grubwork, grubwork-"
"Nate," Gideon interrupted, slipping back into his seat, "you found the skull when you were on a walk during the lunch break, right?"
" ’S right."
"Do you usually take the same walk?"
"Sure, why shouldn’t I?" He glared truculently at Gideon. "Eat a sandwich, then circle the fell. Takes ten minutes. So what?"
"And a scrap of paper caught your attention, and then you saw the fragment?"
Nate made a vexed sound deep in his throat. He was getting sleepy. "Already tol’ you, din’ I?"
"And what color was the paper?"
"How the hell would I know? Who gives a-" He turned to Julie. "Par’n me."
"You already told me once," Gideon said. "I just want to hear it again."
Nate squeezed his eyes shut and puffed out his cheeks. "Boo," he said.
"Blue?"
"Buh-loo." One eye opened stickily, and then the other. "Or was it gheen?"
"Or both?" Gideon asked. "Like this?" He opened his hand to show the roll of Polos lying on his palm; green and white lettering on a blue background.
Nate stared for so long that Gideon began to think he’d gone to sleep again, this time with his eyes open, but at last, with amazement in his voice, he said, " ’S right. ‘S what it was-Polos. How the hell you know tha’?"
Very far gone now, he fell back in his chair, made a swipe at his empty glass of stout, and knocked that over too. "Don’ feel too great," he said. "Think I'll go home." Then he started snoring again, a little less softly and a lot more wetly.
Julie, who had continued to make progress with her lunch, wrinkled her nose and pushed away her plate. "I guess I’ve had enough. Now will you tell me what this is all about? What’s so important about Polos?"
"If you had a project director," Gideon said, "who took a predictable walk every day, and who was a bug on housekeeping, and you wanted him to ‘accidentally’ find a half-buried skull fragment, what would be easier than planting it in his path and then leaving a crumpled-up, bright-blue candy wrapper right there where it would be sure to catch his eye?"
"And you think that’s what this Leon Hillyer did?"
"Well, he’s popping one of these mints every time you look at him, so he’d sure have a supply of wrappers. And a reason."
"To make Nate look bad, you mean? Maybe get him fired?"
"That’s the idea. Leon might easily do better with another major prof who saw things more his way."
Julie shook her head doubtfully. "It sounds pretty farfetched."
"This whole affair is far-fetched. Anyway, it worked; Nate’s in disrepute, isn’t he? And he’s damn likely to lose his job at Gelden."