CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
GARY FOLLOWS THE PINTO CAT
Gary had prospected pretty thoroughly the whole cañon, following the theory that some one—he felt that it was probably Steve Carson—had carried that rich, gold-bearing rock down to the cabin. Waddell had left neither chemicals nor appliances by which he could test any of the mineralized rock he found; but Gary was looking for one particular kind, the porphyry that carried free gold.
Greater than the loneliness, stronger than his dread of the cañon and the cabin, was his desire to find more of that gold-bearing rock. It would not take much of it to make Pat’s investment in Johnnywater more than profitable. He even climbed to the top of the butte—a heart-breaking effort accomplished at the risk of his neck on the sheer wall of the rim rock. There was no means of knowing just where that porphyry had come from. In some prehistoric eruption it might have been thrown for miles, though Gary did not believe that it had been. The top of the bluff gave no clue whatever. Malapi bowlders strewed much of the surface with outcroppings of country rock. Certainly there was no sign of mineral up there. He tramped the butte for miles, however, and spent two days in doing it. Then, satisfied that the porphyry must be somewhere in the cañon, he renewed his search on the slope.
Prospecting here was quite as difficult, because so much of the upper slopes was covered with an overburden of the malapi that formed the rim rock. Portions of the rim would break and slide when the storms beat upon it. Considerable areas of loose rock had formed during the centuries of wear and tear, and if there had been mineral outcroppings they were as effectually hidden as if they had never come to the surface at all. But a strain of persistence which Gary had inherited from pioneering forebears held him somewhat doggedly to the search.
He reasoned that he had more time than he knew what to do with, and if a fortune were hidden away in this cañon, it would be inexcusable for him to mope through the days without making any systematic effort to find it. Patricia deserved the best fortune the world had to bestow. To find one for her would, he told himself whimsically, wipe out the stain of owning a profile and a natural marcel wave over his temples. Pat might possibly forgive even his painted eyebrows and painted lashes and painted lips, if he found her a gold mine.
So he tramped and scrambled and climbed from one end of the cañon walls to the other, and would not hint to Monty Girard what it was that held him in Johnnywater Cañon. He would not even put his hopes on paper in the long, lonely evenings when he wrote to Patricia. After the jibing letter concerning the millions she might have if she owned a mine as rich as the rock he had found behind the cabin, Gary had not put his search into words even when he talked to Faith.
He found himself thinking more and more about Steve Carson. The weak-souled Waddell he had come practically to ignore. Waddell had left no impress upon the cañon, at least, so far as Gary was concerned. And that in spite of the fact that he was walking about in Waddell’s boots and trousers, wearing Waddell’s hat, tending Waddell’s pigs. Walking in Waddell’s boots, Gary wondered about Steve Carson, speculated upon his life and his hopes and the things he had put away in his past when he came to Johnnywater to live alone, wholly apart from his fellows. Steve Carson’s hands had built the cabin between the two piñons. Steve Carson—Gary did not attempt any explanation of why he knew it was so—had brought the gold-bearing rock to the cabin. A prospector of sorts, he must have been, to have found gold-bearing rock in that cañon.
It was during the forenoon after Gary had returned from Kawich that he obeyed a sudden, inexplicable impulse to follow Faith, the mottled cat.
Ever since Gary had come to Johnnywater he had seen Faith go off across the creek after breakfast. Usually she returned in the course of three or four hours, and frequently she brought some small rodent or a bird home with her. Gary had been faintly amused by the pinto cat’s regular hours and settled habits of living. He used to compliment her upon her decorous behavior, stroking her back while she purred on his knee, her paws tucked snugly close to her body.
On this morning Gary rose abruptly from the doorstep, and, bareheaded, he followed Faith across the creek and up the bluff. It was hot climbing, but Gary did not think about the heat. Indeed, he was not consciously thinking of anything much. He was simply following Faith up the bluff, because he had got up from the doorstep to follow Faith.
Faith climbed up and up quite as if she knew exactly where she was going. Gary, stopping once on a bowlder to breathe for a minute after an unusually stiff bit of climbing, saw the cat look up in the queer way she had of doing. In a minute she went on and Gary followed.
It began to look as if Faith meant to climb to the top of the butte. She made her way around the lower edge of a slide, went out of sight into a narrow gulch which Gary, with all his prospecting had never noticed before—or at least had never entered—and reappeared farther up, just under the rim rock where many slides had evidently had their birth. For the first time since he had left the cabin, the cat looked back at Gary, gave an amiable mew and waited a minute before she started on.
Gary hesitated. He was thirsty, and the rapid climb was beginning to tell on him. He looked back down the bluff to the cool green of the grove, and for the first time wondered why he had been such a fool as to follow a cat away up here on a hunting trip in which he could not possibly take any active interest or part. He told himself what a fool he was and said he must be getting goofy himself. But when he moved it was upward, after the cat.
He brought up at the foot of a high ledge seamed and cracked as one would never suspect, looking up from below. It was up here somewhere that the Voice always seemed to be located. He stopped and listened, but the whole cañon lay in a somnolent calm under the mounting sun. It looked as if nothing could disturb it; as if there never could be a Voice other than the everyday voices of men. While he stood there wiping his forehead and panting with the heat and the labor of climbing, the red rooster down in the grove began to crow lustily. The sound came faintly up to Gary, linking him lightly to commonplace affairs.
A little distance away the cat had curled herself down in a tiny hollow at the edge of the slide. Gary made his way over to her. She opened one eye and regarded him sleepily, gave a lazy purr or two and settled herself again more comfortably. Gary saw, from certain small scratchings in the gravel, that the pinto cat had made this little nest for herself. She had not been hunting at all. She had come to a spot with which she was very familiar.