CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I DON’T BELIEVE IN SPOOKS”
A silence significant, almost sinister, fell. Gary rose from the doorsill, took a restless step or two and turned, so that he faced Monty, and the open doorway. He looked past Monty, into the cabin. A quick glance, almost a furtive one. Then he laughed, meeting Monty’s inquiring eyes mockingly.
“Seen anything? No. Nothing I shouldn’t see, at least. Why?” He laughed again, a mirthless kind of laugh. “Did Waddell throw in a spook along with the Voice?”
“Waddy got powerful oneasy,” Monty observed, choosing his words with some care. “Waddy claimed he seen Steve Carson frequent. I didn’t know——Say! Did the Piutes tell yuh-all how Steve Carson looked?”
Gary’s eyes slid away from Monty’s searching look.
“No. I didn’t ask. I just got a notion that Waddell maybe looked like that.” He lifted his chin, his glance once more passing Monty by to go questing within the cabin.
“I don’t believe in spooks,” he stated clearly, a defiant note creeping into his voice in spite of him. “That’s the bunk. When people start seeing spooks, it’s time they saw a doctor and had their heads X-rayed. I’ll tell you what I think, Monty. I think that when we check out, we stay out. Get me? I can’t feature giving death all these encores—when, damn it, the audience is sitting hunched down into its chairs with its hands over its faces, afraid to look. If we clapped and stamped and whistled to get ’em out before the curtain, then I’d say they had some excuse.
“I tell you, Monty, I’ve got a lot of respect for the way this Life picture is being directed. And it don’t stand to reason that a director who’s on to his job is going to let a character that was killed off in the first reel come slipping back into the film in the fourth reel. I know what that would mean at Cohen’s. It would mean that some one in the cutting room would get the gate. No, sir, that’s bad technique—and the Big Director up there won’t stand for any cut-backs that don’t help the story along.” His eyes left Monty’s face to send another involuntary glance through the open door. “So all this hokum about ghosts is pure rot to me.”
“Well, I ain’t superstitious none myself,” Monty repeated somewhat defensively. “I never seen anything—but one time I was here when Waddy thought he seen something. He tried to point it out to me. But I couldn’t see nothin’. I reckon you’re right. And I’m shore glad yuh-all feel that way.”
The spotted cat, having dined well upon a kangaroo rat caught down by the creek, was sitting near them calmly washing her face. She got up, looked up into the open doorway, and mewed a greeting. Then she trotted to meet—a memory, perhaps. She stopped three feet from the doorstep and stood there purring, her body arched with a rubbing movement.
Monty Girard turned his head and stared at the cat over his shoulder. Three deep creases formed between Gary’s eyebrows while he also watched the pantomime. The cat turned, looked up ingratiatingly (still, perhaps, clinging to a memory) and trotted away toward the creek exactly as if she were following some one. Monty got up and the eyes of the two men met unsmilingly.
“Oh, heck,” said Gary, shrugging his shoulders. “Come on and see the hay I’ve put up!”
They walked in a constrained silence to the alfalfa field. Monty cast a critical eye over the raggedy edge of the cutting. He grinned slowly, tilting his head sidewise.
“Whereabouts did yuh-all learn to swing a scythe?” he asked banteringly. “I reckon yuh could do it a heap better on a hawse.”
“But the darned horse idea blew up on me. Did the balloon stunt. You get me, don’t you?” Gary’s laugh hinted at overstrained nerves. “I wish you’d been here then, Monty. Why, I didn’t dig any grave. I had to excavate a cellar to plant him in.” He waved a hand toward the haycocks. “How do you like the decorations? You will observe that they are somewhat larger than were being worn by meadows last year. These are the new 1921 models, specially designed with the stream-line effect, with a view to shedding rain. Also hail, snow and any other form of moisture. They are particularly good where horses are unavailable for hauling hay to a stack.”
“I’ll run in the horses to-morrow,” Monty volunteered casually. “The two of us together ought to get that hay hauled in a day, all right. Spuds is lookin’ good. I reckon this ain’t your first attempt at farming.”
“The first and the last—I’ll tell a waiting world. Say, I forgot you might be hungry. If this new hay won’t give your horse acute gastritis, why not tie him down by the cabin and carry him a forkful or two? I can’t feature this corral stuck off here by itself where we can’t keep an eye on it. Still, if you say it’s all right, we’ll put him in.”
Monty said it was all right, and Gary did not argue. His spirits had reacted to the stimulus of Monty’s presence, and he was conscious now and then of a heady feeling, as if he had been drinking champagne. His laughter was a bit too frequent, a shade too loud to be perfectly normal. The mental pendulum, having been tilted too far in one direction, was swinging quite as far the other way in an effort to adjust itself to normalcy.
Monty Girard was not of an analytical temperament, though circumstance had forced him to observe keenly as a matter of self-protection. He apprehended Gary’s mood sufficiently to let him set the tempo of their talk. Gary, he remembered, had been two weeks alone in Johnnywater Cañon. By his own account he was wholly unaccustomed to isolation of any degree. Monty, therefore, accepted Gary’s talkative mood as a perfectly natural desire to make up for lost time.
But there was a reserve in Gary’s talk, nevertheless, an invisible boundary which he would not pass and which held Monty Girard within certain well-defined conversational limits. It seemed to pass directly through Gary’s life at Johnnywater, and to shut off completely the things which Monty wanted most to know. Of all the trivial, surface incidents of those two weeks, Gary talked profusely. His amusing efforts to corral the pigs and keep them there; his corraling of the horses on the old Piute’s hard-gaited pony; his rural activities with hoe and irrigating shovel; all these things he described in great detail. But of his mental life in the cañon he would not speak.
But Monty Girard was observing, and he watched Gary rather closely during the three days which he spent at Johnnywater. He saw Gary’s lips tighten when, on the second evening just after supper, the Voice shouted unexpectedly from high up on the bluff. He saw a certain look creep into Gary’s eyes, and the three little creases show themselves suddenly between his eyebrows. But the next moment Gary was looking at Monty and laughing as though he had not heard the Voice.
Monty Girard, having eyes that saw nearly everything that came within their range of vision, saw also this: He saw Gary frequently rise, walk across the cabin and stand with his back leaning against the wall, facing the place where he had been sitting. He would continue his laughing monologue, perhaps—but his eyes would glance now and then with reluctance toward that place, as if he were testing an impression. After a bit of that, Gary would return and sit down again, resuming his old careless manner. The strange, combative look would leave his eyes and his forehead would smooth itself.
Gary never spoke of these things, and Monty Girard respected his silence. But he felt that, although he knew just what the pigs had done and how long it took to corral the horses and how many blisters it took to “scythe” the hay, he would remain in ignorance of Gary’s real life in Johnnywater Cañon, the life that was changing him imperceptibly but nevertheless as surely as old age creeps upon a man who has passed the peak of his activities.
“Yuh-all better ride on over with me to my camp and stop there till you get a chance to ride in to town,” Monty said, when they were unhooking the team from the hay wagon after hauling in the last load of alfalfa. “Yuh can turn the pigs loose again and let ’em take their chances on the coyotes, same as they was doin’ when yuh come. Some one’s liable to come drivin’ in to my camp any day. But,” he added significantly, “yuh’ll set a long time before anybody comes to Johnnywater.”
“That’s all right,” Gary said easily, pulling the harness off the horse he was attending to, and beginning to unbuckle the collar strap, stiff and unruly from disuse. “I’ll just stick here for awhile, anyway. Er—the potatoes need a lot of man-with-the-hoe business.” His fingers tugged at the collar strap. He would not look up from his work, though he knew that Monty was eyeing him steadily over the sweaty backs of the horses.
“I’d kill that damned cat if I was you,” Monty exploded with a venom altogether foreign to his natural manner. “Waddy’d never let it near the house. He never did and I never knowed why till the other day.”
Gary had one expression which usually silenced all argument. Patricia called it his stubborn smile. Dead men who have gone out fighting sometimes wear that same little smile frozen immutably upon their features. It was that smile which answered Monty Girard.
Monty looked at him again, puzzled and more than slightly uneasy.
“Yuh better come along with me,” he said again, persuasively, as one urges the sick to follow the doctor’s orders.
“No—I think I’ll just stick around for awhile.” Having removed the collar, Gary gave the horse a slap on the shoulder that sent it off seeking a soft spot on which to roll.
“Well, for God’s sake, kill that cat! By gosh, it’s enough to drive a fellow crazy. It’s wrong in the head and—and yuh know it might have hydrophoby.”
Gary laughed. “Why, I couldn’t keep house without the pinto cat! That’s great business. Furnishes atmosphere and—er—entertainment.”
It was perfectly apparent that Gary had some secret reason for staying. Something which he would not tell Monty Girard, although the two had become rather good friends. Monty’s face clouded; but Gary slapped him reassuringly on the shoulder.
“Tell you what you do, old fellow. You draw me a map so I can find my way over to your place later on. And if one of these horses is any good under the saddle, I’ll keep him in the corral so I’ll have something to ride. Now I’ve got hay, the beggar ought to make out all right.”
Monty had to be content with that and rode away to his own camp somewhat reluctantly, leaving Gary standing in the doorway of the cabin, his hands braced against the frame on either side, smoking and staring after him a bit wistfully.