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And then you got cattle up and down the creek, ruining the stream banks, getting erosion started and everything silted up.” It was cool up here, probably a mile and a half above sea level, but Demott was sweating. He wiped his brow on his shirtsleeve.
“The way it’s supposed to work, it’s kinda like a drawbridge. You make a section of fence across the creek and just hang it from that cable with a dry log holding the bottom down. When the flood comes down, the log floats. That lifts the wire, the brush sails right by under it, and when the runoff season’s over, the log drops back into place and you’ve got a fence again.”
“It sounds pretty foolproof,” Leaphorn said, thinking that it might work with snowmelt, but runoff from a male rain roaring down the side of a mesa would knock it into the next county and take the cable with it, and the trees, too. “Or maybe I should say cowproof.”
Demott looked skeptical. “Actually, it just works until too much stuff catches on the log,” he said. “Anyway, it’s worth trying.” He sat on a boulder, wiped his face again.
“What can I tell you?”
“I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “But we wrote off this thing with your brother-in-law almost eleven years ago. It was just another adult missing person case. Another skip-out without a clue to where or why. So there’s been a lot of time for you to get a letter, or hear some gossip, or find out that somebody who knew him had seen him playing the slots in Las Vegas. Something like that.
There’s no crime involved, so you wouldn’t have had any reason to tell us about it.” Demott was wiping mud off the side of his hand on his pant leg. “I can tell you why they hired you,” he said.
Leaphorn waited.
“They want this place back.”
“I thought they might,” Leaphorn said. “I couldn’t think of another reason.”
“The sons-a-bitches,” Demott said. “They want to lease out the mineral rights. Or more likely, just sell the whole outfit to a mining company and let ’em wreck it all.”
“That’s the idea I got from the bank lady at Mancos.”
“Did she tell the plan? They’d do an open pit operation on the molybdenum deposits up there.” Demott pointed up Cache Creek, past the clusters of white-barked aspens, past the stately forest of ponderosa, into the dark green wilderness of firs. “Rip it all out,” he said, “and then . . . “
The emotion in Demott’s voice stopped him. He took a deep breath and sat for a moment, looking down at his hands.
Leaphorn waited. Demott had more than this to say. He wanted to hear it.
Demott gave Leaphorn a sidewise glance. “Have you seen the Red River canyon in New Mexico? Up north of Taos?”
“I’ve seen it,” Leaphorn said.
“You seen it before and after?”
“I haven’t been there for years,” Leaphorn said. “I remember a beautiful trout stream, maybe a little bigger than your creek here, winding through a narrow valley. Steeper than this one. High mountains on both sides. Beautiful place.”
“They ripped the top right off of one of those mountains,” Demott said. “Left a great whitish heap of crushed stone miles long. And the holding ponds they built to catch the effluent spill over and that nasty stuff pours down into Red River. They use cyanide in some sort of solution to free up the metal and that kills trout and everything else.”
“I haven’t been up there for years,” Leaphorn said.
“Cyanide,” Demott repeated. “Mixed with sludge. That’s what we’d have pouring down Cache Creek if the Breedlove Corporation had its way. That slimy white silt brewed with cyanide.”
Leaphorn didn’t comment on that. He spent a few minutes letting Demott get used to him being there, listening to the music of Cache Creek bubbling over its rocky floor, watching a puffy white cloud just barely making it over the ridge upstream. It was dragging its bottom through the tips of the fir trees, leaving rags of mist behind. A beautiful day, a beautiful place. A cedar waxwing flew by. It perched in the aspens across the creek and watched them, chirping bird comments.
Demott was watching him, too, still absently picking at the resin and dirt on his left hand. “Well, enough of that,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you. I got no letters and neither did Elisa. If she had, I would have known it. We’re a family that don’t keep secrets, not from one another. And we didn’t hear anything, either. Nothing.”
“You’d think there’d be rumors,” Leaphorn said. “You know how people are.” 51 of 102
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TheFallenMan
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“I do,” Demott said. “I thought it was strange, too. I’m sure there must have been a lot of talk about it up at Mancos and around. Hal disappearing was the most exciting thing that happened around here in years. I’m sure some people would say Elisa killed her husband so she could get the ranch, or she had a secret boyfriend do it, or I killed him so the ranch would come back into the Demott family.”
“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “I’d think that would be the natural kind of speculation, considering the circumstances. But you didn’t hear any of that kind of talk?”
Demott looked shocked. “Why, they wouldn’t say things like that around me. Or Elisa either, of course. And you know, the funny thing was Elisa loved Hal, and I think folks around here understood that.”
“How about you? What did you think of him?”
“Oh, I got pretty sick of Hal,” Demott said. “I won’t lie about it. He was a pain in the butt. But you know in a lot of ways I liked him. He had a good heart, and he was good for Elisa. Treated her like a quality lady, and that’s what she is. And it made you feel sad, you know. I think he could have amounted to something if he’d been raised right.” Demott despaired of getting the hand suitably clean by rubbing at it. He got up, squatted by the stream, and washed it.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” Leaphorn said. “What went wrong?” Finished with his ablutions, Demott resumed his seat and thought about how to tell this.
“Hard to put it exactly,” he said. “But when he was just a kid his folks would send him out here and we’d get him on a horse, and he’d do his share of work just like everybody else. Made a good enough hand, for a youngster. When we was baling hay, or moving the cows or anything, he’d do the twelve-hour day right along with us. And when the work was laid by, he’d go rock climbing with me and Elisa. In fact he got good at it before she did.” Demott exhaled hugely, shook his head.
No mention of Tommy Castro. “Just the three of you?” Leaphorn asked.
Demott hesitated. “Pretty much.”
“Tommy Castro didn’t go along?”
Demott flushed. “Where’d you hear about him?”
Leaphorn shrugged.
Demott drew in a deep breath. “Castro and I were friends in high school and, yeah, he and I climbed together some. But then when Elisa got big enough to learn and she’d come along, Tommy began to make a move on her. I told him she was way too young and to knock it off. I put a stop to that.”
“He still climb?”
“I have no idea,” Demott said. “I stay away from him. He stays away from me.”
“No problem with Hal, though.”
“He was more her age and more her type, even though he was citified and born with the old silver spoon.” Demott thought about that. “You know,” he said, “I think he really did love this place as much as we did. He’d talk about getting his family to leave it to him as his part of the estate. Had it all figured out on paper. It wasn’t worth near as much as the share he’d get otherwise, but it was what he wanted. That’s what he’d say. Prettiest place on earth, and he’d make it better. Improve the stream where it was eroding.
Plant out some ponderosa seedlings where we had a fire kill. Keep the herd down to where there wouldn’t be any more overgrazing.”