A Thief of Time Read Online Free PDF

it.”
    They found more boxes of potsherds in the closet, each shard bearing a label that seemed to identify it with the place it had been found. They found an album of photographs, many of them snapshots of people who seemed to be anthropologists working at digs. There were three notebooks—two filled and one almost half filled—in which little pencil drawings of abstract patterns and pots were interposed with carbon rubbings of what they agreed must be the surface patterns of potsherds. The notes that surrounded these were in the special shorthand scientists develop to save themselves time.
    â€œYou studied this stuff at Arizona State,” Thatcher said. “Can’t you make it out?”
    â€œI studied anthropology,” Leaphorn admitted. “But mostly I studied cultural anthropology. This is a specialty and I didn’t get into it. We went on a few digs in a Southwestern Anthro class, but the Anasazi culture wasn’t my thing. Neither were ceramics.”
    Among the papers on the bed were two Nelson’s catalogs, both auctions of American Indian art, African art, and Oceanic art. Both facedown, both open to pages that featured illustrations of Mimbres, Hohokam, and Anasazi pots. Leaphorn studied them. The appraised prices ranged from $2,950 to $41,500 for a Mimbres urn. Two of the Anasazi ceramics had been circled in red in one catalog, and one in the other. The prices were $4,200, $3,700, and $14,500.
    â€œHeard of Nelson’s all my life,” Thatcher said. “Thought they were just a London outfit. Just auctioned art, masterpieces, the Mona Lisa, things like that.”
    â€œThis is art,” Leaphorn said.
    â€œA painting is art,” Thatcher said. “What kind of nut pays fourteen grand for a pot?” He tossed the catalog back on the bed.
    Leaphorn picked it up.
    The cover picture was a stylized re-creation of a pictograph—stick-figure Indians with lances riding horses with pipestem legs across a deerskin surface.
    Across the top the legend read:
    NELSON’S
    FOUNDED 1744
    Fine American Indian Art
    New York
    Auction May 25 and 26
    It opened easily to the pottery pages. Ten photographs of pots, each numbered and described in a numbered caption. Number 242 was circled in red. Leaphorn read the caption:
    242. Anasazi St. John’s Polychrome bowl, circa A.D . 1000–1250, of deep rounded form, painted on the interior in rose with wavy pale “ghost lines.” Has a geometric pattern enclosing two interlocked spirals. Two hatched, serrated rectangles below the rim. Interior surface serrated. Diameter 7¼ inches (19 cm). $4,000/$4,200.
    Resale offer by an anonymous collector. Documentation.
    Inside the scrawled red circle, the same pen had put a question mark over “anonymous collector” and scribbled notations in the margin. What looked like a telephone number. Words that seemed to be names. “Call Q!” “See Houk.” Houk. The name made a faint echo in Leaphorn’s mind. He’d known someone named Houk. The only notation that meant anything to him was: “Nakai, Slick.” Leaphorn knew about Slick Nakai. Had met him a time or two. Nakai was a preacher. A fundamentalist Christian evangelist. He pulled a revival tent around the reservation in a trailer behind an old Cadillac sedan, putting it up here and there—exhorting those who came to hear him to quit drinking, leave off fornication, confess their sins, abandon their pagan ways, and come to Jesus. Leaphorn scanned the other names, looking for anything familiar, read the description of a Tonto Polychrome olla valued at $1,400/$1,800. He put the catalog back on the bed. On the next page, a Mimbres black-on-white burial pot, with a “kill hole” in its bottom and its exterior featuring lizards chasing lizards, was advertised for $38,600. Leaphorn grimaced and put down the catalog.
    â€œI’m going to make a sort of rough inventory,”