CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
GARY FINDS THE VOICE—AND SOMETHING ELSE
“Here’s where Handsome Gary raises a crop of callouses big as birds’ eggs in his mad pursuit of the fickle jade, Fortune. Come on, Faith, doggone you; I want you handy in case this gold thing is a fluke.”
Gary had remembered that eating is considered necessary to the preservation of life and had delayed his further investigation of the outcropping until he had scrambled together some sort of a meal. He had bolted food as if he must hurry to catch a train that was already whistling a warning. Now he took down a canteen from behind the door, shouldered an old pick and shovel he had found in the shed, and started back up the bluff, stopping just long enough to fill the canteen at the creek as he passed.
Loaded with canteen and tools, the climb was a heart-breaking one. The spotted cat led the way, going as straight as possible toward the tiny ridge behind which lay the outcropping. At the top, Gary decided that hereafter he would bring a lunch and spend the day up there, thus saving a valuable hour or two and a good deal of energy. Energy, he realized, would be needed in unlimited quantities if he did much development work alone.
By hard labor he managed to clear away the rubble of the slide and uncover the vein for a distance of several feet before dusk began to fill the cañon. He carried down with him the richest pieces of rock that he could find, and that night he worked with mortar and pestle until his arms ached with the unaccustomed exercise.
Several times that evening he was pulled away from his air castles by the peculiar sensation of some one standing very close to him. It was not the first time he had experienced the sensation, but never before had the impression brought him a comforting sense of friendly companionship. It struck him suddenly that he must be growing used to the idea, and that Johnnywater Cañon was not at all likely to “get” him as it had got Waddell. He had not heard the Voice all day, but he believed that he could now listen to it with perfect equanimity.
He had just one worry that evening; rather, he had one difficult problem to solve. In order to work in that quartz, dynamite was absolutely necessary. Unless he could find some on the place, it began to look very much as if he would not be able to do much unless he could get some brought out to him from town.
The result of his cogitations that evening was a belief that Steve Carson must have had dynamite, caps and fuse on hand. Men living out in a country known to produce minerals of one sort and another usually were supplied with explosives. Even if they never did any mining, they might want to blow a bowlder out of the way now and then. He had never seen any powder about the place; but on the other hand, he had not looked for any.
The next morning he panned the pulped rock immediately after breakfast and was overjoyed at the amount of gold he gleaned from the pint or so of pulp. At that rate, he told himself gleefully, the wedding ring would not need to wait very long. After that he went hunting dynamite in the storehouse and shed. He was lucky enough to find a couple of dozen sticks of powder and some caps and fuse wrapped in a gunny sack and hung from the ridgepole of the shed. The dynamite did not look so very old, and he guessed that it had been brought there by Waddell. This seemed to him an amazing bit of good luck, and he shouldered the stuff and went off up the bluff with an extra canteen and his lunch, whistling in an exuberance of good humor with the world. Faith, of course, went with him and curled herself in her little hollow just under the frowning malapi ledge.
Gary worked for three days, following the quartz and porphyry down at an incline of forty-five degrees. The vein held true to form, and the samples he panned each morning never failed to show a drag of gold after the concentrate. It was killing work for a man unused to pick and shovel. In the afternoon of the third day even Gary’s driving energy began to slow down. He had learned how to drill and shoot in rock, but the steady swing of the four-pound hammer (miners call them single-jacks) lamed his right arm so that he could not strike a forceful blow. Moreover, he discovered that twisting a drill in rock is not soothing to broken blisters. So, much as he wanted to make Patricia rich in the shortest possible time, protesting flesh prevailed upon him to knock off work for the time being.
He was sitting on the edge of what would one day be an incline shaft—when he had dug it deep enough—inspecting his blistered hands. After several days of quiet the wind began to blow in gusts from off the butte. Somewhere behind Gary and above him there came a bellowing halloo that made him jump and slide into the open cut. Again and again came the bellow above him—and after his first astonishment Gary’s mouth relaxed into a slow grin.
“I’ll bet right there’s the makings of that spook Voice!” he said aloud. “Up there in the rim rock somewhere.”
He climbed out of the cut and stood facing the cliff, listening. At close quarters the call became a bellow with only a faint resemblance to a Voice shouting hello. He remembered now that on that first morning when he had searched for the elusive “man” on the bluff, the wind had died before he had climbed very high. After that he had not heard the Voice again that day.
He made his way laboriously up to the rim rock, listening always to locate the exact source of the sound. The bluff was almost perpendicular just under the rim, and huge bowlders lay where they had fallen in some forgotten time from the top. Gary scrambled over the first of these and confronted a narrow aperture which seemed to lead back into the cliff. The opening was perhaps three feet wide at the bottom, drawing in to a pointed roof a few feet above his head.
The Voice did not seem to come from this opening, but Gary’s curiosity was roused. He went into the cave. Fifteen feet, as he paced the distance, brought him to the rear wall—and to a small recess where a couple of boxes sat side by side with a three-pound coffee can on top and a bundle wrapped in canvas. Gary forgot the Voice for the time being and began to investigate the cache.
It was perfectly simple; perfectly amazing also. The boxes had been opened, probably in order to carry the contents more easily up the bluff; the most ambitious man would scarcely want to make that climb with a fifty-pound box of dynamite on his shoulder. But both boxes were full, or so nearly full that the few missing sticks did not matter. The coffee can contained six boxes of caps, and in the canvas bundle were eight full coils of fuse.
“Golly grandma, if this ain’t movie luck!” Gary jubilated to the cat, which had tagged him into the cave. “Or it would be if the dynamite were fresh. From the weird tales I’ve heard about men who got fresh with stale dynamite and landed in fragments before a horrified audience, Handsome Gary’s liable to lose his profile if he doesn’t watch his step. But it’s giant powder, and if it will shoot at all, I’ve simply got to use it. It’s just about as necessary a prop in this scene as a rope is in a lynching bee. Well, now we’ll go ketchum that Voice.”
By dint of hard climbing he made his way higher, to where the ledge seemed broken in splintered clefts above the slide. As he went, the Voice bellowed at him with a rising tone which distance might easily modify to a human cry. Even so close, he was some time in discovering just how the sound was made. But at last, after much listening and investigating the splintered slits, he caught the rush of wind up through a series of small, chimneylike openings. Here, then, was the Voice that had given Johnnywater Cañon so weird a reputation.
As to the appearance of the Voice just after Steve Carson’s disappearance, Gary considered that an exaggeration, unconscious, perhaps, but nevertheless born of superstitious fear. Steve Carson might have told a different story could he have been questioned about the sound.
“I’d say that Injun was about due to check out, anyway,” he told Faith, who was nosing a crack that probably held a rat or two. “Now I see how it’s done, the Voice isn’t half so mysterious or spookish as all that giant powder right on hand where I need it. Don’t even have to pack it up the bluff. And that’s Providence, I’ll tell the cock-eyed world! When I think how I chased that supernatural Voice all over the bluff and then sat and shivered in the cabin because I couldn’t find it—Faith, I should think you might have told me! You can’t kid me into believing you weren’t wise all the while. You know a heap more than you let on. You can’t string me.”
He made his way back to the cave and examined more carefully the giant powder cached there. He cut a foot length of fuse, lighted and timed it with his watch. The fuse burned with almost perfect accuracy—a minute to the foot. Then he capped a two-foot length, broke a stick of powder in two, carefully inserted the cap in the dynamite and went out and laid it under a bowlder the size of a half-barrel. He scraped loose dirt over it, split the fuse end back an inch, “spitted” it with his cigarette and ducked into the cave with his watch in his hand to await the result.
The explosion lifted the bowlder, and broke it in three pieces, and Gary felt that the experiment had been a success. The powder would probably miss fire occasionally, since it was crystallized with age. It might also explode when he least expected it to do so, but Gary was prepared to take that risk; though many an old miner would have refused profanely to touch the stuff.
“Well, I used to take a chance on breaking my neck every time I put over a stunt before the camera,” he mused. “That was just to hold down a job. I ought to be dead willing to take a chance with this junk when it means millions for my girl—maybe.”
With explosives enough to last him a couple of months at the very least, Gary felt that Fate was giving him a broad smile of encouragement. He acknowledged to himself, while he mortared rich pieces of porphyry and quartz that night, the growing belief that he had been all wrong in blaming Patricia for making the investment. It was, he was beginning to think, the whispering of Destiny that had urged Patricia to buy Johnnywater in the first place; and it was Destiny again at work that had pushed him out of pictures and over here to work out the plan.
Perhaps he did not reduce the thought to so definite a form, but that was the substance of his speculations.
So he dreamed and worked with untiring energy through the days, dreamed and pulped gold-bearing rock for the wedding ring during the evenings when he should have been resting, and slept like a tired baby at night. Whenever he heard the Voice shouting from the bluff, he shrugged his shoulders and grinned at the joke the wind was trying to play. Whenever he felt that unseen presence beside him, if he did not grin he at least accepted it with a certain sense of friendly companionship. And the spotted cat, Faith, was always close, like a pet dog.