CHAPTER ELEVEN
“HOW WILL YOU TAKE YOUR MILLIONS?”
“Johnnywater Cañon,
“On a Dark and Gloomy Night.
“My Princess Pat:
“You are the possessor of a possession of which you wittest not. You have a ghost. Wire Conan Doyle, Sir Oliver Lodge and others of their ilk. Ask them what is the best recipe for catching a Voice. The gink up on the bluff that does so much vocal practice is not a gink—he’s a spook. He’s up there vocaling right now, doing his spookish heckest to give me the willies.
“Pat, did you send me out here just from curiosity, to see if I’d go goofy? Tut, tut! This is no place for a flabby-souled young man; broad shoulders, my dear girl, don’t amount to a darn in grappling with a man-size Voice. I believe you did, you little huzzy. I remember you distinctly mentioned howling on a hill, and my sitting in the cabin listening to it. Great idea you had. I’m sitting here listening. What am I supposed to do next?
“You also indicated business of listening to a horse champing hay in a stable. Well, I have a horse at last, but the property man overlooked the sod-roofed stable. Not having the prop in which my horse should champ, he’s picketed up the cañon, and he’s supposed to be champing sagebrush or grass or something. He isn’t doing it though. He absolutely refuses to follow direction. He’s up there going ‘MMMH-hmmm-Hmmm-hm-hm-hm!!!!’ I’m sorry, Pat, but that’s exactly what he’s doing—as close as it can be put into human spelling. He can’t feature this cañon, honey. I suspect he’s flabby souled, too.
“He wants to chase off with the rest of the bunch about ten or fifteen miles. Nobody loves this cañon except the psychic cat and the two pigs. And the pigs don’t love it any more; not since I made a rock corral and waylaid the little devils when they went snooping in there after some stuff I put in a trough. I baited the trap, you see—oh, this gigantic brain of mine has been hitting on all two cylinders lately!—and then I hid. Lizards crawled over me, and the sun blistered the back of my neck while I waited for those two brutes to walk into the foreground. Animal pictures are hard to get, as you may have heard while you were enduring a spasm of Handsome Gary’s shop talk. Cut. Iris in Gary sneaking up with the board gate he’d artcrafted the day before. So the pigs don’t love Handsome Gary any more, and they’re spending most of their spare time talking about me behind my back and hunting for a soft place where they can run a drift under my perfectly nice rock fence, and then stope up to the surface and beat it, registering contempt. I’ll call ’em shoats if they don’t behave.
“I scythed some alfalfa to-day, Pat. Put on a swell rural comedy, featuring Handsome Gary making side-swipes at his heels. It was a scream, I reckon. But I came within an inch of scything Faith, only she’s a wizard at jumping over rocks and things, and she did as pretty a side-slip as you ever saw, and made her get-away. I’ve wondered since—would I have had two pinto cats, or only one psychic Voice? I mean one more psychic Voice. This one up on the bluff used to belong to Steve Carson, according to the yarn the Piutes told me. He’d have made a great director, if the rest of him measured up to his lung power. The Piutes say he faded out very mysteriously, five years ago, leaving his holler behind him. I’m afraid folks didn’t like him very well. At any rate his Voice is darned unpopular. I can’t say it makes any great hit with me, either. Though it’s not so bad, at that. The main trouble seems to be not having any man to go with the Voice. The Piutes couldn’t feature it at all. They wouldn’t drive the horses into the corral, even. I had to double for them when they got the bunch down there at the mouth of the cañon. Jazzed around for two hours on an Injun pony with a gait like a pile driver, getting your horses into your corral. You seem to have four or five fair imitations, Pat. The rest are the bunk, if you ask me. Not broken and not worth breaking. Don’t even look good to eat.
“There is one work team which I mean to give a try-out when I put on my character part entitled, Making Hay Whether the Sun Shines or Not. They have collar marks, and they’re old enough to be my dad’s wedding team. Lips hang down like a mule, and hollows over their eyes you could drop an egg in. I hate to flatter you, kid, but your horse herd, take it by and large, is not what I’d be proud of. You’re a wonderful girl—you got stung in several places at once.
“Haven’t seen anything yet of Monty Girard. Can’t think what’s the matter, unless that savage Ford of his attacked him when he wasn’t looking. It will be just as well now if he holds off till I get your alfalfa cut and stacked. I’ll have a merry heck of a time doing it alone. There’s about four acres, I should judge. To-morrow morning I start in and do a one-step around the patch with that cussed scythe. You needn’t think it’s going to be funny—not for Handsome Gary. I tried to get the youngest Piute to double for me in the part, but nothing doing. ‘Them holler no good,’ is what he said. Funny—I kinda feel that way myself. Money wouldn’t tempt ’em. He spoke well of Steve Carson, too; but he sure as heck don’t like his voice.
“What would you say, kid, if I found you a mine in here? I’ve had the strongest hunch—I can’t explain it. I keep thinking there’s a mine up on the bluff where that Voice is. I suppose I can trace the idea back to that porphyry float I picked up the day after I landed here. I found another piece yesterday, lying out here behind the cabin. It must have been packed in from somewhere else. Pretty rich-looking rock, kid. If I could find enough of that, you wouldn’t need to pound out invoices and gol-darned letters about horse feed and what to wean calves on. You could have a white mansion topping that hill of ours, where we climb up and sit under the oak while we build our air castles. Will we ever again? You feel farther away than the sun, kid. I have to write just to keep my thoughts from growing numb with the damned chill of this place. You know—I wrote it down before. It’s hell to be wondering what you’d see if you looked around....
“Well, if I find you a mine you can have your mansion on the hill. Because, if the mine stacked up like the rock I found, you could carry a million dollars around with you careless-like for spending money—street-car fare, you know, and a meal at the cafeteria, and such luxuries. And if your pocket was picked or your purse snatched or anything, you could wave your hand airily and say, ‘Oh, that’s all right. I’ve hundreds of millions more at home!’ How’d you like that, old girl?
“Because I mortared a piece of that rock and panned it. It was rich, Pat—so darned rich it scared me for a minute. I thought I had a bad case of Desert Rat’s Delusion. I wouldn’t tell you this, kid, if I ever meant to send the letter. I’m just writing to please myself, not you. No, sir, I wouldn’t tell you a word about it. I’d just go ahead and open up the mine—after I’d found it—and get about a million dollars on the dump before I let a yip out of me. Then maybe I’d send you word through your lawyer saying ‘I begged to inform you that I had dug you a million dollars, and how would you have it?’ Golly grandma, if I could only find the ledge that rock came from!
“You know, Pat, you got me all wrong that night. What made me so doggoned sore was to think how you’d handed over five thousand dollars to a gink, just on the strength of his say-so. It showed on the face of it that it was no investment for you to make. It wasn’t that I am so stuck on the movies. Heck knows I’m not. But I sure am stuck on the job that will pay me the money I can get from working in the movies. I’ll rent my profile any time—for a hundred dollars a day, and as much more as I can get. That’s what the contract would have paid me the first year, Pat, and double that the second if I made good. So I was dead willing to put paint on my eyebrows and paint on my lips, and let my profile—if you insist that’s all I got over on the screen—earn a little home for my Princess Pat and me.
“But if I could find a mine to match that chunk of rock, the studios would never see Handsome Gary—never no more. I’d kiss my own girl on the lips—for love. Honest, Pat, those kisses, that looked so real on the screen and made you so sore, were awfully faked. I never told you. I guess I’m a mean cuss. But I never touched a girl’s lips, Lady, after I met you. I had one alibi guaranteed never to slip. I told ’em, one and all, confidentially before we went into the scene, that they could trust me. I swore I’d remember and not smear their lips all over their cheeks. I said I knew girls hated that, and I’d be careful. Then it was up to me to do some plain and fancy faking. And when my Lady Patricia put up her chin and registered supreme indifference, it always tickled me to see how well I’d put it over. I always meant to tell you some time, girlie.
“I had a wild idea when I left the city that I’d maybe write down a story I’d been framing in my mind when I was on location and waiting between scenes. I told Mills just enough of it to get him curious to hear the rest. He told me to write it out in scenario form and if it was good he’d see that the company bought it. That would have been a couple of hundred more toward our home, kid. The point is, I laid in a lot of paper. Now that darn story’s gone stale on me and I’m using up the paper writing letters to you that you’ll never read. As a little blond jane in our company was always saying, ‘Isn’t life a perfect scream?’ I’ll say it is.
“Your Grouchy Gary.”