Gary got up from his chair three separate times to remove the lamp chimney (using a white cambric handkerchief to protect his manicured fingers from blisters). In the beginning, the flame had flourished two sharp points that smoked the chimney. After the third clipping it had three, and one of them was like a signal smoke in miniature.
Gary eyed it disgustedly while he filled his pipe. Smoking a pipe while he dreamed in the fire glow had made so popular a close-up of Gary Marshall that he had used the pose in his professional photographs and had, to date, autographed and mailed sixty-seven of the firelight profiles to sixty-seven eager fans. Nevertheless, he forgot that he had a profile now.
“Hunh! Pat ought to get a real kick out of this scene,” he snorted. “Interior cabin—sitting alone—lifts head, listens. Sub-title: THE MOURNFUL HOWL OF THE COYOTE COMES TO HIM MINGLED WITH THE SOUND OF HORSES CHAMPING HAY. Only there ain’t no horses, and if there were they wouldn’t champ. Only steeds do that—in hifalutin’, gol-darned poetry. Pat ought to take a whirl at this Johnnywater stuff, herself. About twenty-four hours of it. It might make a different girl of her. Give her some sense, maybe.”
Slowly his pessimistic glance went around the meager rectangle of the cabin. Think of a man holding up here for two years! “No wonder he went out of here a nut,” was Gary’s brief summary. “And it’s my opinion the man’s judgment had begun to skid when he bought the place. Good Lord! Why, he’d probably seen it before he paid down the money! He was a tough bird, if you ask me, to hang on for two years.”
Gary’s pipe, on its way to his lips that had just blown out a small, billowy cloud of smoke, stopped halfway and was held there motionless. His whole face stilled as his mind concentrated upon a sound.
“That’s no coyote,” he muttered, and listened again.
He got up and opened the door, leaning out into the starlight, one hand pressed against the rough-hewn logs of cedar. He listened again, turning his head slightly to determine the location of the sound.
A wind from the west, flowing over the towering butte, shivered the tops of the piñons. A gust it was, that died as it had been born, suddenly. As it lessened Gary heard distinctly a far-off, faint halloo.
“Hello!” he called back, stepping down upon the flat rock that formed the doorstep. “What’s wanted? Hello!”
“’ll-oo-ooh!” cried the voice, from somewhere beyond the creek.
“Hello!” shouted Gary, megaphoning with his cupped palms. Some one was lost, probably, and had seen the light in the cabin.
Again the voice replied. It seemed to Gary that the man was shouting some message; but distance blurred the words so that only the cadence of the voice reached his ears.
Gary cupped his hands again and replied. He went down to the little creek and stood there listening, shouting now and then encouragement to the man on the bluff. He must be on the bluff, or at least far up its precipitous slope; for beyond the stream the trees gave way to bowlders, and above the bowlders rough outcroppings in ledge formation made steep scrambling. The top of the bluff was guarded by a huge rampart of solid rock; a “rim-rock” formation common throughout the desert States.
Gary tried to visualize that sheer wall of rock as he had seen it before dark. Without giving it much thought at the time, he somehow took it for granted that the cañon wall on that side was absolutely impassable. Still, there might be a trail to the top through some crevice invisible from below.
“Gosh, if a fellow’s hurt up there, I’ll have a merry heck of a time getting him down in the dark!” Gary told the mottled cat with one blue eye, that rubbed against his ankle. “There ought to be a lantern hanging somewhere. Never saw an interior cabin set in my life where a tin lantern didn’t register.”
He found the lantern, but it had no wick. Gary spent a profane fifteen minutes holding the smoky lamp in one hand and searching a high, littered shelf with the other, looking for lantern wicks. That he actually found one at last, tucked into a tomato can among some bolts and nails, seemed little short of a miracle. He had to rob the lamp of oil, because he did not know where Waddell kept his supply. Then the wick was a shade too wide, and Gary was obliged to force it through the burner with the point of his knife. When he finally got the lantern burning it was more distressingly horned than the lamp, and the globe immediately began an eclipse on one side. But Gary only swore and wiped his smeared fingers down his trousers, man-fashion.
Almost constantly the voice had called to him from the bluff. Gary went out and shouted that he was coming, and crossed the creek, the mottled cat at his heels. Gary had never been friendly toward cats, by the way; but isolation makes strange companions sometimes between animals and men, and Gary had already made friends with this one. He even waited, holding the lantern while the cat jumped the creek, forgetting it could see in the dark.
He made his way through the bushy growth beyond the stream, and scrambled upon a huge bowlder, from where he could see the face of the bluff. He stood there listening, straining his eyes into the dark.
The voice called to him twice. A wailing, anxious tone that carried a weight of trouble.
Gary once more megaphoned that he was coming, and began to climb the bluff, the smoking lantern swinging in his hands (a mere pin-prick of light in the surrounding darkness), the mottled cat following him in a series of leaps and quick rushes.
The lamp had gone out when Gary returned to the cabin. The lantern was still smoking vilely, with fumes of gas. Gary put the lantern on the table and sat down, wiping his face and neck with his handkerchief. The mottled cat crouched and sprang to his knee, where it dug claws to hang on and began purring immediately.
For an hour Gary had not heard the voice, and he was worried. Some one must be hurt, up there in the rocks. But until daylight came to his assistance Gary was absolutely helpless. He looked at his watch and saw that he had been stumbling over rocks and climbing between bowlders until nearly midnight. He had shouted, too, until his throat ached.
The man had answered, but Gary had never been able to distinguish any words. Always there had been that wailing note of pain, with now and then a muffled shriek at the end of the call. High up somewhere on the bluff he was, but Gary had never seemed able to come very close. There were too many ledges intervening. And at last the voice had grown fainter, until finally it ceased altogether.
“We’ll have to get out at daylight and hunt him up,” he said to the cat. “I can’t feature this mountain goat stuff in the dark. But nobody could sit still and listen to that guy hollering for help. It’ll be a heck of a note if he’s broken a leg or something. That’s about what happened—simplest thing in the world to break legs in that rock pile.”
He stroked the cat absent-mindedly, holding himself motionless now and then while he listened. After awhile he put the cat down and went to bed, his thoughts clinging to the man who had called down from the bluff.