CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
GARY RIDES TO KAWICH
Gary saddled Jazz, filled the two canteens at the creek, tied some food for himself and rolled barley for Jazz in a flour sack—with a knot tied between to prevent mixing—and rode down the trail before the dust had fully settled after the passing of James Blaine Hawkins.
Primarily he wanted to make sure that Hawkins was actually leaving for town. After that he meant to ride over to Kawich, if he could find the place. In the mental slump that followed close on the heels of his altercation, Gary felt an overwhelming hunger for speech with a friend. Monty Girard was practical, wholesome and loyal as a man may be. Not for a long while had Gary known a man of Monty Girard’s exact type. He confessed frankly to himself that certain phases of the James Blaine Hawkins incident had shaken his nerves. He was not at all sure that he meant to tell Monty about that side of the encounter, but he felt that he needed the mental tonic of Monty Girard’s simple outlook on life. There was nothing subtle, no complexities in Monty’s nature.
He dismounted and fastened the gate carefully behind him with a secret twist of the wire that would betray the fact if another opened the gate in his absence. As an added precaution he brushed out the trail of his own passing, as far as he could reach inside the gate with a pine branch. It was not likely that any one would visit Johnnywater Cañon; but Gary felt an unexplained desire to know it if they did. There was not one chance in a hundred that any one passing through the gate would observe the untracked space just within. An Indian might. But Gary had no fear that any Indian would invade Johnnywater Cañon. For that matter, it was not fear at all that impelled the caution. He simply wanted to know if any one visited the place.
Far down the mesa a cloud of gray dust rolled swiftly along a brown pencil-marking through the sage. That would be James Blaine Hawkins heading for Las Vegas as fast as gas and four cylinders would take him. Gary pulled up and watched the dust cloud, his eyes laughing.
“God bless that pinto cat!” he murmured, and leaned to smooth the sorrel’s mane which the wind was tossing and tangling. “We won’t see him again—for a while, anyway. But golly grandma, won’t Pat be sore at the way I jimmed her revenge on Handsome Gary! But you know, Jazz, I expect to have to live with Pat, and I don’t expect to do all my walking on my knees, either. A little demonstration of manly authority now and then does ’em good. They won’t own it, Jazz, but they all like to feel they’ve tamed a cave man, and goodness knows when he may get rough. I worked in ‘The Taming of the Shrew,’ and I learned a lot about women from that.”
The dust cloud rolled out of sight around a lonesome black butte, and Gary waved it a mocking farewell and got out the map which Monty had made of the trail to Kawich.
“Five miles down the trail toward town, and then turn short off to the left,” he mumbled, studying the crude map. “That’s simple enough—and no wonder I couldn’t trail Monty afoot. I didn’t walk to where he turned off. But hold on here! Dotted line shows faint stock trail straight across country to the Kawich road. Monty did say something about a cut-off, Jazz. All right, we’ll hunt around here in the sage till we find that dotted line. This is great stuff. Feel so good now I don’t have to go see Monty to get cheered up. But we’ll go just the same—and see the country.”
The trail, when he found it, was so faint that it was scarcely distinguishable in the gravelly soil. In places where they followed a rocky ridge Gary would have missed it altogether; but once on the trail Jazz followed it by instinct and his familiarity with the country. Probably he had traveled that way before, carrying Waddell, or perhaps Steve Carson, since Jazz was well past his youth.
Unconsciously Gary laid aside his movie habit of weaving in and out among the sage at a gallop, and dropped back into the old, shacking trail-trot he had learned from his father’s riders. It was the gait to which Jazz was long accustomed, and it carried them steadily over the rough mesa to where the road angled off through the foothills.
The distant hills looked more unreal than ever. The clouds that grouped themselves around the violet-tinted peaks were like dabs of white paint upon a painted sky line. Again the sense of waiting in a tremendous calm impressed Gary with the immeasurable patience of the universe.
Insensibly the mental burden of loneliness, the nameless dread of things unseen and incomprehensible, lightened. The strained look left his eyes; the lines in his face relaxed as if he slept and, sleeping, forgot the worries of his waking hours. The world around him was so big, so quiet—the forces of nature were so invincible in their strength—that the cares of one small human being seemed as pettily unimportant as the scurrying of a lizard down the road. It occurred to Gary whimsically that the lizard’s panicky retreat before the approaching cataclysm of the horse’s shadow was very real and tremendously important—to the lizard. Quite as important, no doubt, as the complexity of emotions that filled the human soul of a certain Gary Marshall in Johnnywater Cañon. And the great butte that stood in its immutable strength under the buffetings of wind and sun and rain looked alike upon the troubles of the lizard and of Gary Marshall.
“After all, Jazz, we haven’t got such a heck of a lot to worry about. If I was a jack rabbit I reckon I’d still have troubles of my own. Take your ears off your neck, Jazz, and shack along. Packing me over to Kawich isn’t the worst thing could happen you, you lazy brute.”
Gradually it dawned upon Gary that the road was creeping around the great butte that held Johnnywater Cañon gashed into the side turned toward the southeast. He wondered if the place called Kawich might not be just across the butte from Johnnywater. There was a certain comfort in the thought that Monty might not be so far from him, after all. Above him towered the bold outline of the butte, capped by the sheer wall of rock that rose like a cliff above its precipitous slopes. The trail itself followed the line of least resistance through the wrinkles formed in the foothills when this old world was cooling. But however deep the cañon, wherever the winding trail led, always the butte stood high-shouldered and grim just under the clouds. Gary could not wonder at the dilapidated condition of Monty’s Ford, when he saw the trail it had been compelled to travel.
He ate his lunch beside a little spring that trickled out from beneath a rock just above the trail. Another hour’s riding brought him into the very dooryard of a camp which he judged was Monty’s, though no one appeared in answer to his call.
In point of picturesqueness and the natural beauty of its surroundings, Gary felt impelled to confide to Jazz that Johnnywater had Kawich beaten to a pulp. Kawich lacked the timber and the talkative little stream that distinguished Johnnywater Cañon. The camp itself was a rude shack built of boards and canvas, with a roof of corrugated iron and a sprinkle of tin cans and bits of broken implements surrounding it. The sun beat harshly down upon the barren knoll, and heat waves radiated from the iron roof. A cattle-trodden pathway led down to a zinc-lined trough in a hollow. The trough was full, with little lips of water pushing out over the edge here and there in a continuous drip-drip that muddied the ground immediately beneath the trough and made deep trampling tracks when the cattle crowded down to water. A crude corral was built above the trough, enclosing one end so that corralled stock could drink at will. The charred remains of the burnt Ford tilted crazily on the slope with its nose toward a brushy little gulch.
Gary took in all the bleak surroundings and the general air of discomfort that permeated the place. It struck him suddenly that Johnnywater Cañon was not so bad a place after all, with its whispery piñons, its picturesque log cabin set in the grove and the little gurgling stream just beyond. If it were not for the Voice and the eerie atmosphere of the place, he thought a person might rather enjoy a month or two there in the summer. Certainly it held more of the vacation elements than did this camp at Kawich.
He dismounted, led Jazz down into the corral, unsaddled him and left him to his own devices. There did not seem to be any feed about the place, and he was glad that he had brought plenty of grain for Jazz. He could do very well for twenty-four hours on rolled barley rations, Gary thought.
Monty could not be very far away, for he had eaten his breakfast there and had left cooked food covered under a cloth on the table for his next meal. As to the comforts of living, Monty seemed to be no better off than was Gary in Johnnywater Cañon. A camp bed in its canvas tarp was spread upon the board bunk in one corner of the shack. The cook stove was small and rusty from many rains that had beaten down through the haggled hole in the corrugated iron roof. The stovepipe was streaked with red lines of rust. There was the inevitable cupboard built of boxes nailed one above the other, bottoms against the wall. There was the regulation assortment of necessary supplies: coffee, salt, lard, a can of bacon grease, rice, sugar, beans and canned corn and tomatoes. Of reading matter, Monty seemed to have a little more than Waddell had left behind him. There was a small pile of Stock Growers Journals, some old Salt Lake papers and half a dozen old Populars with the backs torn off.
Gary chose a magazine that had a complete novel by an author whose work he liked. He stretched himself out on his back on the bunk, crossed his feet, wriggled his shoulders into a comfortable position just under Monty’s only pillow, and in two sentences was away back in Texas after a mysterious gang of cattle rustlers.