The old man gave a wry smile. “I’d believe it before I believed some of the words I read in the Bible,” he said, quietly. “Them Indians knew their lands, you see, and they knew their skies and their waters, and they knew all about the spirits and the demons that dwelled in those lands and those skies and those waters. The way that trapper told me, the day of the dark stars was going to happen before the twentieth century turned—he wasn’t sure when, but that was what he was told.”

Neil raised his eyebrows. “Sounds scary, doesn’t it? But who’s going to call these demons down? I’ve been to powwows at a couple of Indian reservations, and there’s an Indian who comes down to Bodega Bay to fish, and it seems to me that there isn’t much magic left in any of today’s red people.”

“It’s not today’s red people you’ve got to worry about,” said Billy Ritchie. “It’s the spirits of the red people from out of the past. What this trapper told me was that the greatest of all the medicine men, the twenty-two most powerful wonder-workers from all the main tribes, all of their spirits would come together, God knows how, and they’d call down the worstest demons they could, and get their revenge.”

“You mean the ghosts of twenty-two old-time medicine men are supposed to be getting together to punish us? Come on, Billy. That’s a tall story and you know it.”

Billy Ritchie didn’t look offended. “People have said that before,” he said, philosophically. “But let me show you something, before you make up your mind that all those old Indian legends were nonsense.”

He propelled himself across to a small bureau which stood in the far corner of the room and opened the top drawer. He shuffled through a heap of untidy papers and news clippings while Neil watched him silently and drank his beer.

“Here we are,” said Billy Ritchie, after a while, and wheeled himself over. He gave Neil two black-and-white photographs, full plate size, and told him, “Take a close look at those.”

One of the photographs showed a street scene in Calistoga. It was hard to tell when it was, because the town had hardly changed in fifty years. There were horses and buggies, and men in wide-brimmed hats, but it could have been taken any time between 1890 and 1920.

In the foreground of the picture stood a group of men with drooping mustaches, and just to their left, sitting on the edge of the boardwalk, was an Indian, in a dusty, black business suit. He was handsome and well-built, and around his neck he wore strings of necklaces and beads, which indicated that he was a medicine man.