Indiana Jones and the Unicorn's Legacy

by Rob MacGregor

  "You won't be able to use this arm for at least a couple of weeks," the doctor said as he finished.

  "I don't have to stay in bed, do I?" the Englishman asked.

  "Well, you definitely won't feel like dancing tonight, young man. You can expect some pain for awhile, maybe a little fever. Just take it easy. Okay, stay right here. The sheriff's deputy will want to get your story."

  "I told you, it was just an accident. You see—"

  "Sorry. You've got to talk to the deputy. I just pull out the bullets and patch the holes." The doctor walked out of the room.

  Walcott didn't want to talk to the law. They wouldn't believe that he'd accidentally shot himself, especially after they found out about what happened at Mesa Verde.

  Two orderlies garbed in white outfits walked into the room and helped him into a wheelchair. "Where you taking me?"

  "Out," one of them said.

  There was something familiar about the two men, Walcott thought as they quickly wheeled him down the corridor. Both were hulking men with Mediterranean features. Calderone! They were his bodyguards. Walcott turned in his seat and started to say something, but one of the men made a quick motion with his hand silencing him.

  He rolled out the front door. A car was waiting; doors opened; hands lifted and guided him. "Watch the arm. Ouch!" Doors closed, and less than five minutes after the bullet had been removed, Walcott was out of the hospital and speeding away.

  "Mr. Calderone!" he exclaimed to the man sitting in the back seat with him. "I—I thought you had left."

  Calderone tapped the head of his black cane lightly on Walcott's knee. He cleared his throat, and the mole on his cheek twitched as he spoke. "I thought it best if I stayed a bit longer to see how things went. I wanted to make sure that you didn't run off... or go on a drinking binge before your work was completed."

  "We ran into trouble. We were attacked."

  Calderone waved a hand as if he didn't care to hear about it. "Where is she?"

  "I don't know. Everything went bloody crazy. But I'll find her, I promise."

  "Indy, wake up."

  He blinked open his eyes. He was sweating and gasping for air. But he hadn't been shot. He was in bed, aching all over, and Shannon was standing next to him. "What happened? Where am I?"

  "Take it easy," Shannon said. "You were yelling in your sleep."

  "Wait a minute. We were at Mesa Verde. I didn't dream that."

  "You bet you didn't dream it. You fell into an open kiva and knocked yourself out after you heard the shooting in the valley."

  Indy touched his brow and felt a gauze pad and tape. He saw that Shannon's forearm was bandaged. "How long ago was that?"

  "Last night."

  Indy winced as he sat up. A sharp, piercing pain lanced through the back of his head; he felt a lump at the base of his skull. He looked toward the darkened windows. "What time is it now? Where is the sun?"

  "It's almost midnight. You slept most of the day. I was getting worried, but the doc said to just let you sleep. Remember when he examined you?"

  A hazy image of a dark-haired man with a mustache and a black bag came to mind. "Yeah, sort of."

  Indy leaned back on the bed, resting on his elbows. "How'd you get me back to Bluff?"

  "Don't ask. Smitty and I had a time of it getting you out of that hole. We finally tied your whip around you and pulled you out. Then we carried you for nearly a half a mile up a trail to the top. He is one strong old man, I'll tell you that!"

  That probably accounted for part of his dream in which he was caught in a snare and held upside down. But he was more confused than ever. "What happened to Mara and Walcott?"

  "We don't know. Smitty wanted to look for her, but I talked him out of it. Too many crazy cowboys and Indians for me, and I wanted to get you out of there. I thought you might be really hurt."

  "You just left her down there?"

  "We went back this morning. Rangers were all over the place. They'd heard about the trouble, and found five bodies. But no Mara, no Walcott."

  "What was it about, anyhow?"

  "The grandfather of one of the Utes was stabbed by the same guys who caught me and Mara. I told you all this before. Don't you remember?"

  Indy rubbed his face. "It's all sort of a blur." He noticed a piece of gauze taped on one side of Shannon's neck. "What's that? I thought you were hit in the shoulder."

  "Turns out I got hit twice, just grazed on the neck, and a superficial wound to the shoulder. I'll live."

  "You're lucky."

  "The good news is we found your Ford. I drove you back here."

  Indy could care less about the car. He recalled Mara being dead, then alive, then vanishing in his dream. What had she said? Please help me....

  "You think she's alive?"

  Shannon shrugged. "Like I said, there's no body."

  Indy swung his legs over the side of the bed, ignoring the piercing pain in the back of his head. "We've got to find her, Jack."

  "Not tonight, we don't," Shannon said.

  Smitty walked into the room. "The darnedest thing I ever heard. Well, Indy, you're back among the living. How are you doing?"

  "I'm getting better by the second. What were you talking about a moment ago?"

  "One of the sheriff's deputies told me that a doctor at the hospital in Cortez treated a guy with a minor bullet wound who fit Walcott's description. But by the time the Cortez cops got there, he was gone."

  "What about Mara?"

  "There's a posse looking for the Utes. Seems they might've taken her."

  "What's this all about, Indy?" Shannon asked.

  "You're asking the wrong person, Jack. You probably know more than I do."

  "Can I get you something to eat, Indy?" Smitty asked.

  "You sure can. I'm starving."

  "Okay, a bowl of my favorite mutton soup coming right up. I got some bread and lard, too."

  "Sounds good, but you can save the lard."

  "Suit yourself," Smitty said, and he walked off.

  "He's been cooking the mutton soup all day. It beats beef jerky and boiled potatoes, which was what I got in that kiva."

  "Sit down, Jack." Indy nodded to the chair next to the bed. "Why were you and Mara kidnapped and put down there?"

  "It was supposed to be you and Mara. Not me," Shannon said, emphatically. "And I can't figure that woman out. But she's right up your alley, I'll say that much. You two should do real well together."

  Indy hadn't even seen Mara yet, much less gotten involved with her. Yet, he was involved and he didn't even know what it was about. "Tell me about it."

  "She's up to her eyeballs in the same sort of stuff that's always getting you into trouble."

  "Can you be a little more specific for once, Jack?"

  "Sure. Your old buddy Walcott was after some weird artifact, and thought she had it."

  "What is it?"

  "She didn't want to talk much about it, but she called it a unicorn's horn."

  Indy repeated what he'd said as if to make sure that he'd heard right. "No such thing. Unicorns are myth. They don't exist; they never did. Why, they weren't even a myth in America. There are thousands of Indian legends and myths filled with animals that talk and reason like people. But there's not one single unicorn in any of them."

  "I'm just telling you what she said."

  Indy touched the back of his head again as he felt another sharp shoot of pain. "She must have been joking."

  "It wasn't the time or place to joke, Indy."

  "Maybe it's a horn from a mastodon."

  "She said unicom. How's your head feel?"

  "It could be better. What else did she say about this horn?"

  "It had something to do with her family, but she didn't go into details."

  "Did you say anything to Smitty or anyone else about it?"

  "No, I thought I'd wait and tell you first."

  Indy smiled. "That's what I like about you, Jack. You know how to play your cards."
/>
  Shannon shrugged. "I almost forgot. There's something else she told me." He smiled gamely. "A message, just for you."

  "Yeah, what?"

  "She said that if I got out alive and she didn't make it, I was to tell you..."

  "Go on, what did she say?"

  "I'm thinking. I memorized it. Okay, this was it: the letters A, M, N, H, and the numbers seventy-three and nineteen-twenty. And then the letters N, C, N."

  "Huh?"

  "She said you would know what it meant."

  "I'm glad she was so confident. Why didn't she just tell you what it meant?"

  "She said if I knew what it all stood for, Walcott might get it out of me, and she didn't want him to know."

  "Anything else?"

  "That's about it. I thought she was going to tell me something more, but then she just said that it was ironic that we were being held captive in a kiva so close to the 'underworld.'"

  Indy flopped back down on the bed. "Write those letters and numbers down for me, will you? I'll have to think about it."

  "Wait a minute. There was something else. I almost forgot."

  "What's that?"

  "The letters B, T, B, H. That goes at the end of the message."

  Indy rolled over. "Swell."

  Smitty opened the trophy case filled with Anasazi artifacts in his sunny library and picked out a piece of corrugated pottery. He ran his fingers over the wavy ridges of a bowl that was probably more than a thousand years old. He held it in both hands at arm's length, as if supplicating a god. "Why do you think they made the pots so rough on the outside like this one?"

  Indy looked up from the overstuffed chair in the corner. A notebook rested on his lap, and written on it was the combination of letters and numbers that Mara had given Shannon. It was midmorning and he felt well enough to be out of bed, but he was still suffering from a recurring headache. Meanwhile, Mara was missing, and Indy was left only with her cryptic message. "Probably so it would be easier to carry a wet pot after it was filled with water."

  "Maybe. But there was a guy staying here who was with some museum of natural history a few years back, and he thought they made 'em like this so they'd look like woven baskets. You know, me and Wetherill found lots of stuff from the Basketmaker people, who were here first. So maybe the Anasazis thought that clay pots were more practical, but they liked the looks of the old baskets. You see what I mean?"

  "Yeah, I get it, Smitty." Indy wondered whether Smitty really had done everything he'd said. Maybe he'd been with Wetherill, maybe not. But what bothered him most about Smitty was his cavalier attitude about his daughter's disappearance. If he was worried about her, he didn't show it. "There's something I don't understand, Smitty. You don't seem too worried about Mara. Why aren't you out looking for her?"

  Smitty put the pot back in the cabinet, then took a step toward Indy, his fists tightening into balls. "Tell me where to look. I'm ready to go. I handled all the police questions while you were upstairs snoozing. I've done everything I can. Doin' my best, and she ain't been much of a daughter to me, either."

  "I'm sorry. It's just that..." Indy tapped his pencil against the notebook. "I'm not getting anywhere fast with this thing and I hate just sitting around."

  "I'd like to help with that puzzle, but those letters and numbers don't mean a thing to me, and as far as sitting around goes, that's not for me, either. If all this hadn't happened I'd be out hiking in the canyons. That's where my life is."

  "I'd like to be there with you. By the way, what do you know about a unicorn's horn?"

  Smitty turned his attention back to the glass case and seemed to be studying his collection of artifacts. "What are you talking about?"

  "That's what Mara said Walcott was after."

  "She did? Nobody told me about that." The old prospector shuffled his feet. He knew something.

  "C'mon, Smitty. What's it about?"

  "Don't know nothin' about any unicorns."

  "How about a mastodon horn?"

  "Well, I used to have a staff that was made of ivory. A pretty thing with a silver tip and a beautiful silver handle. Mara's mother called it a unicorn's horn. I didn't see whose head it came from so I can't rightly say what it was made out of. She left it here when she ran off with the girl."

  "What did it look like?"

  "Ivory, straight, and sort of swirled."

  "What do you mean by swirled?"

  "It looked like a piece of ivory that had gotten soft and someone had twisted it."

  Exacdy what the mythical unicorn's horn was supposed to look like. "Does Mara have it now?"

  He shrugged. "Don't know. If she does, she never told me about it."

  "Well, what happened to it?"

  Smitty waved a hand and grimaced. "Oh, years back, when I was drinking, I pawned it at the trading post. I needed the money. Besides, Rosie wanted me to get rid of it. She thought the thing had something to do with my drinking."

  "How could that be?"

  Smitty laughed. "Don't ask me. She's just superstitious. Anyhow, I ain't never seen it since."

  "Could Mara have picked it up?"

  "No, I asked Neddie about it once a few years back. He's the fella who runs the pawnshop. He said some old Indian he didn't know came and took it off his hands."

  "Maybe he knows who the Indian is," Indy suggested.

  "Tell you what, why don't we go on down and see what Neddie can remember."

  Indy was ready to get out of the house. His headache was just a dull throb unless he turned his head too quickly. "Good idea. We can see what's taking Jack so long, too." Shannon had gone to the trading post to buy butter to replace Smitty's lard, and a few other things. He'd been gone more than an hour.

  He looked at Mara's message again as he stood up. It didn't make a bit of sense.

  The trading post was a combination dry goods store, grocery store, clothing store, and pawnshop. You could buy a fifty-pound sack of flour, a black, high-topped, flat-rimmed hat like the Navajos wore, or a turquoise-and-silver bracelet. But as Indy walked into the trading post, his attention was immediately drawn to the rear of the store and the source of a horrible, ear-splitting racket. He moved through a crowd of apparendy deaf spectators and spotted Shannon playing a saxophone with a shriveled old Negro, who was blowing on a set of bagpipes. The result was an eerie cacophony that sounded like a marching tune for an army headed to hell.

  Maybe it really wasn't so bad. Maybe it was just his headache. The throbbing had started again.

  "What do you think?" a voice yelled in his ear. Indy turned to see Smitty grinning and pointing at Shannon and the old man.

  "I've never heard anything quite like it."

  Indy caught Shannon's eye and made a sour face. Shannon winked, then waved a hand like a conductor bringing a performance to a close. The old man continued through the signal, playing several more squeaky notes before he stopped.

  Smitty applauded, and several people followed his lead. Shannon bowed dramatically and the old man laughed.

  "I didn't know you could play a saxophone, Jack," Indy said as he moved forward.

  "I can blow a few notes, I guess. You must be feeling pretty good if you can listen to us."

  "Yeah, sort of. Who's your friend?"

  "This is Neddie Watson. He runs the pawn shop here in the trading post."

  "Oh, so you're Neddie." Indy shook his hand as Shannon introduced him to Watson. "Where did you learn to play the bagpipes?"

  Watson set the bagpipes down on a chair as Shannon returned the saxophone to its case. "Well, I'm still learning. This here instrument was pawned back in 1914. It sat here for six years. Then the day I turned eighty, I said I'm gonna give meself those pipes and learn to play 'em. Like I said, I'm still learnin'. Maybe if I'd had that saxophone here then, I would've tried it instead."

  "How did you end up in Bluff?" Indy asked.

  "That's what everyone always asks him," Smitty said, joining them.

  "That's right," Watson said
. "They sure do. I was in the army in 'sixty-three and 'sixty-four when we rounded up all the Navajos in Arizona and walked them from Fort Defiance all the way across New Mexico. It was a waste of time, and a lot of lives. The Navajos wouldn't put up with that treatment, and I don't blame them one bit. A lot of them just died, and finally the army released them and gave them some of their land back."

  "Yeah, I've heard about it," Indy said.

  Smitty clasped his friend on the shoulder. "Neddie, you remember that old ivory staff I pawned back ten years ago or so?"

  "That was in 'eighteen. I remember. It was a very strange and beautiful thing. 'Cept it gave me the creeps. I didn't like it around here, and I was glad when I finally got rid of it."

  "Why didn't you like it?" Indy asked.

  "We had two fires here while that thing was hanging on the wall, and we never had one before or after it was gone."

  "Ah, Neddie. That's nonsense," Smitty said. "I never had any fires when I had it."

  "Listen to you. Maybe you didn't have any fires, but you almost drank yourself to death, and if I recall right you sobered up for good after you got rid of that thing."

  "Now you sound like Rosie," Smitty said.

  "So who did you sell it to?" Indy asked before Smitty could respond.

  "Some old Moqui. I remember thinking that he must have pawned most of his turquoise jewelry to get it. He wanted it real bad. Don't know why."

  "What's a Moqui?" Shannon asked.

  Indy remembered hearing the term when he was a kid. "It's a word for Hopi, I think."

  Smitty laughed. "Neddie calls any Indian who doesn't live around here a Moqui."

  "That doesn't narrow it down much," Indy said.

  "It's a funny thing you should ask about that ol' piece of ivory," Watson said. "Some Englishman was asking about it the other day."

  "What did you tell him?" Indy asked.

  "Nothing. I just told him I couldn't remember anything about any ivory stick." He grinned slyly. "Us older folks can get away with lies about our memory, you know."