CHAPTER EIGHT
“THE CAT’S GOT ’EM TOO!”
Monty Girard did not return on the second day. A full week dragged itself minute by minute across Johnnywater; days began suddenly with a spurt of color over the eastern rim of the cañon, snailed it across the blue space above and after an interminable period ended in a red riot beyond the western rim, letting night flow into the cañon.
The first day went quickly enough. At sunrise Gary and the spotted cat searched the bluff where the voice had called beseechingly in the night. Gary carried a two-quart canteen filled with water, knowing that a man who has lain injured all night will have a maddening thirst by morning.
At noon he sat on a bowlder just under the rim rock, helped himself to a long drink from the canteen and stared disheartened down into the cañon. He was hoarse from shouting, but not so much as a whisper had he got in reply. The spotted cat had given up in disgust long ago and gone off on business of her own. He was willing to swear that he had covered every foot of that hillside, and probably he had, very nearly. And he had found no trace of any man, living or dead.
He slid off the bowlder and went picking his way down the steep bluff to the cabin. A humane impulse had sent him out as soon as he opened his eyes that morning. He was half-starved and more nearly exhausted than he had ever been after a hard day’s work doing “stunts” for the movies.
Now and then he looked up the cañon to where Pat’s alfalfa field lay, a sumptuous patch of deep green, like an emerald set deep in some dull metal. Nearer the cabin were the rows of potato plants which Monty had mentioned. There was a corral, too, just beyond a clump of trees behind the cabin. And from the head of the cañon to the mouth he could glimpse here and there the twisted thread of Johnnywater Creek.
By the time he had cooked and eaten breakfast and lunch together, and had fed the chickens, and located the whereabouts of two pigs whose grunting came to him from the bushes, the afternoon was well gone. And, on the whole, it had not gone so badly; except that he rather resented his fruitless search for a man who had shouted in the night and then disappeared.
“Drunk, maybe,” Gary finally dismissed the subject from his mind. “He sure as heck couldn’t be hurt so bad, if he was able to get out of the cañon in the dark. It’ll be something to tell about when I get back. I’ll ask Monty what he thinks about it, to-morrow.”
But he didn’t ask Monty. He rather expected that Monty would be along rather early in the forenoon, and he was ready by nine o’clock. He had filled the feed box for the chickens, had given the cat a farewell talk, and locked his pyjamas into his suit case. The rest of the day he spent in waiting.
One bit of movie training helped him now. By the time an actor has reached stardom, he knows how to sit and wait; doing nothing, thinking nothing in particular, gossiping a little, perhaps, but waiting always. Gary had many a time sat around killing time for hours at a stretch, that he might work for fifteen minutes on a scene. Waiting for Monty, then, was not such a hardship that second day.
But when the third day and the fourth and the fifth had gone, Gary began to register impatience and concern. He walked down the cañon and out upon the trail as far as was practical, half hoping that he might see some chance traveler. But the whole world seemed to be empty and waiting, with a still patience that placed no limit upon its quiescent expectancy.
Steeped in that desert magic which makes beautiful all distances, the big land shamed him somehow and sent him back into the cañon in a better frame of mind. Any trivial thing could have delayed Monty Girard. It was slightly comforting to know that the big world out there was smiling under the sky.
He was sitting at supper just after sundown that evening when a strange thing happened. The spotted cat—Gary by this time was calling her Faith because of her trustful disposition—was squatted on all fours beside the table, industriously lapping a saucer of condensed milk. For the want of more human companionship, Gary was joking with the cat, which responded now and then with a slight wave of her tail.
“You’re the only thing I like about the whole darn outfit,” Gary was saying. “I don’t remember your being mentioned in the deed, so I think I’ll just swipe you when I go. As a souvenir. Only I don’t know what the heck I’ll do with you—give you to Pat, I reckon.”
Faith looked up with an amiable mew, but she did not look at Gary. Had a person been standing near the foot of the bunk six feet or so away, she would have been looking up into his face. She went back to lapping her milk, but Gary eyed her curiously. There was something odd about that look and that friendly little remark of hers, but for the life of him he could not explain just what was wrong.
Once again, while Gary watched her, the cat looked up at that invisible point the height of a man from the floor. She finished her milk, licked her lips satisfiedly and got up. She glanced at Gary, glanced again toward the bunk, arched her back, walked deliberately over and curved her body against nothing at all, purring her contented best.
Gary watched her with a contraction of the scalp on the back of his head. Faith stood there for a moment rubbing her side against empty air, looked up inquiringly, came over and jumped upon Gary’s knee. There she tucked her feet under her, folded her tail close to her curiously mottled fur and settled herself for a good, purry little nap. Now and then she opened her eyes to look toward the bunk, her manner indifferent.
“The cat’s got ’em, too,” Gary told himself—but it is significant that he did not speak the words aloud as he had been doing those five days, just to combat the awful stillness of the cañon.
He stared intently toward the place where the cat had stood arching her body and purring. There was nothing there, so far as Gary could see. But slowly, as he stared toward the place, a mental picture formed in his mind.
He pictured to himself a man whom he had never seen; a tall, lean man with shoulders slightly stooped and a face seamed by rough weather and hard living more than with the years he had lived. The man was, Gary guessed, in his late forties. His eyes were a keen blue, his mouth thin-lipped and firm. Gary felt that if he removed the stained gray hat he wore, he would reveal a small bald spot on the crown of his head. Over one eye was a jagged scar. Another puckered the skin on his left cheek bone. He was dressed in gray flannel shirt and khaki overalls tucked into high, laced boots.
Gary visualized him as being the man who had built this cabin. He thought that he was picturing Waddell, and it occurred to him that Waddell might have been mining a little in Johnnywater Cañon. The man he was mentally visualizing seemed to be of the type of miner who goes prospecting through the desert. And Johnnywater Cañon certainly held mineral possibilities, if one were to judge by the rock formation and the general look of the cañon walls.
Gary himself had once known something about minerals, his dad having sent him to take a course in mineralogy at Denver with a view to making of his son a respectable mining engineer. Gary had spent two years in the school and almost two years doing field work for practice, and had shown a certain aptitude for the profession. But Mills, the motion-picture director, had taken a company into Arizona where Gary was making a report on the minerals of a certain district, and Gary had been weaned away from mines. Now, he was so saturated in studio ideals and atmosphere that he had almost forgotten he had ever owned another ambition than to become a star with a company of his own.
Well, this man then—the man about whom he found himself thinking so intently—must have found something here in the cañon. He did not know why he believed it, but he began to think that Waddell had found gold; though it was not, properly speaking, a gold country. But Gary remembered to have noticed a few pieces of porphyry float on the bluff the morning that he had spent in looking for the man who shouted in the night. The float might easily be gold-bearing. Gary had not examined it, since he had been absorbed in another matter. It is only the novice who becomes excited and builds air castles over a piece of float.
Gary turned his head abruptly and looked back, exactly as he would have done had a man approached and stood at his shoulder. He was conscious of a slight feeling of surprise that the man of whom he was thinking did not stand there beside him.
“I’ll be getting ’em too, if I don’t look out,” he snorted, and dumped the mottled cat unceremoniously on the floor.
It has been said by many that thoughts are things. Certainly Gary’s thoughts that evening seemed live things. While he was washing the dishes and sweeping the cabin floor, he more than once glanced up, expecting to see the man who looked like a miner. The picture he had conjured seemed a living personality, unseen, unheard, but nevertheless present there in the cabin.
Gary was an essentially practical young man, not much given to fanciful imaginings. He did not believe in anything to which one may permissibly attach the word psychic. Imagination of a sort he had possessed since he was a youngster, and stories he could weave with more or less originality. He did not, therefore, run amuck in a maze of futile conjecturing. He believed in hunches, and there his belief stopped short, satisfied to omit explanations.
That night fell pitch black, with inky clouds pushing out over the rim rock and a wind from the west that bellowed across the cañon and whipped the branches of the pines near the cabin. Above the clouds played the lightning, the glare of it seeping through between the folds and darting across small open spaces.
Gary sat in the doorway watching the clouds with the lightning darting through. True to his type and later training, he was thinking what a wonderful storm scene it would make in a picture. And then, without warning, he heard a voice shouting a loud halloo from the bluff. Again it called, and ended with a wail of pain.
Gary started. He turned his face to the cañon side and listened, deep lines between his eyebrows. It was almost a week since he had heard the call, and it did not seem natural that the man should be shouting again from the same point on the bluff. He had been so sure that the fellow, whoever he was, had left the cañon that first night. It was absolutely illogical that he should return without coming near the cabin.
Gary got up and stood irresolute in the doorway. The voice was insistent, calling again and again a summons difficult to resist.
“Hello-oo-ooh! Hello-oo-ooh!” called the voice.
Gary cupped his hands around his mouth to reply, then hesitated and dropped them to his side. He turned to go in for the lantern and abandoned that idea also. On that first night he had answered repeatedly the call and had searched gropingly amongst the bowlders and ledges. His trouble had gone for nothing, and Gary could think of but one reason why he had failed to find the man: he believed the man had not wanted to be found, although there was no sense in that either. The stubborn streak in Gary dominated his actions now. He meant to find the fellow and have it out with him. He remembered Monty’s remark about Waddell imagining he heard things, and selling out in a hurry, his nerves gone to pieces. Probably the man up on the bluff could explain why Waddell left Johnnywater!
Gary crossed the creek during spurts of lightning, and made his way cautiously up the bluff. After spending a long forenoon there he knew his way fairly well and could negotiate ledges that had stopped him that first night. He went carefully, making himself as inconspicuous as possible. The voice kept shouting, with now and then a high note that almost amounted to a shriek.
The storm broke, and Gary was drenched to the skin within five minutes. Flashes of lightning blinded him. He stumbled back down the bluff and reached the cabin, the storm beating upon him furiously. As he closed the door, the voice on the bluff shrieked at him, and Gary thought there was a mocking note in the call.