She didn’t add and I should know, but she might just as well have. Both the authoritative tone of her voice and the fact that she mentioned it could be done at all confirmed his hunch that she had somehow messed with the phone system when he had tried to call her to chew her out.

And a little cold chill ran up his spine for a moment or two. A Medicine Woman powerful enough to mess with the phone system—what did that take, anyway? Was there anything she couldn’t do? Or—

He caught himself up sharply. Dammit! She did it to me again!

“So what do you think is happening?” he asked.

“My best guess is that someone might just be sending ringers over to Calligan to keep him from filling those slots.” She gave him a sharp look. “That ‘someone’ wouldn’t be you, would it?”

He brought his head up indignantly. “Me? Why the hell would I do something like that?”

“To keep Calligan from filling those slots,” she said, logically. “Those are jobs theoretically being taken away from Indians. It would be a good way to preserve them until our guys came off the sick list.”

“Oh.” Damn, he wished he had thought of that one! “No, it isn’t me.”

“Then maybe I ought to find out if there really is a plot, because I don’t think the Little People are behind this one.”

“Neither do I,” he told her—and actually, that did agree with the feeling he’d gotten when Billy told him this morning. He was beginning to get a feel for which incidents were caused by the mi-ah-luschka and which by purely human hands.

Not that the “feeling” made him any more comfortable. He would really rather not have anything to do with Medicine at all, except admire the showmanship from afar. …

Are you a shaman, or are you a showman? one of his friends used to ask the people he suspected of fakery, or of catering to the supermarket psychic crowd. Up until last night he would have said that anyone who claimed to be the former was really the latter.

Until now. …

“How sure are you about this ‘false trail’ stuff?” he asked, unwilling to make the concession, but also unwilling to let her get away with putting on a show rather than giving him real facts.

She snorted, delicately. “Sure enough to bet my life on not following it,” she said. “But if you want more—”

Before he had a chance to protest that no, he really didn’t want any more, thank you, she had reached into a drawer in her desk, and had taken out a little bag of something. As she dusted it over her desk-blotter and the cassette that lay there, chanting under her breath, he recognized it as corn pollen.