CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE VALUE OF A HUNCH
The resiliency of youth, aided by the allurement of riches to be gained by digging, drove Gary back up the bluff to his work. Here again circumstances had forced him to continue where he would voluntarily have left off. In digging out the body of Steve Carson, Gary had dug completely through the broken stuff to a continuation of the vein and its contact beyond.
He felt that he understood in a general way what had happened five years ago. Steve Carson had undoubtedly discovered the gold-bearing quartz and had started to sink on the vein much as Gary had done. The calamity of a cave-in—or perhaps a slide—had overtaken him while he was at work underground. He had never known what hit him, which was a mercy. And since no one in the country had heard of the prospect up on the bluff, the discovery of his body would never have been made if Gary had not followed the cat up there and so stumbled upon the vein.
He thought he also understood now why Faith had shown her strange penchant for that particular spot on the bluff. Monty had told him that the cat had belonged to Steve Carson. She had undoubtedly been in the habit of following Steve Carson to work, just as she followed Gary. Very likely she had been somewhere near at the time when her master was killed. That she should continue the habit of going each day to the spot where she had last seen him was not unlikely. So another small mystery was cleared to Gary’s satisfaction. Save for its grim history, Johnnywater Cañon was likely to drop at last to the dead level of commonplace respectability.
If Steve Carson had worked in an open shaft that had been filled by a slide, the opening had been effectually blocked afterward. For on the surface Gary could see no evidence whatever, among the piled bowlders, of an opening beneath. And the roof, when he lifted his candle to examine it, looked to be a smooth expanse of rock.
For himself, he pronounced his own incline shaft safe from any similar catastrophe. He had started it at the extreme edge of the slide, and above it the rocks seemed firmly in place. He was working under dangerous conditions, it is true; but the danger lay in using five-year-old dynamite. Still, he must chance it or let the development of Patricia’s claim stand still.
Pondering the necessary steps to protect Patricia in case anything happened to him, Gary wrote a copy of his location notice, declared the necessary location work done, described the exact spot as closely as possible—lining it up with blazed trees in the grove behind the cabin, and placed the papers in his suit case. That, he knew, would effectually forestall any claim-jumping; unless James Blaine Hawkins or some other crook appeared first on the scene and ransacked his belongings, destroying the papers and placing their own location notices on the claim. He felt that the danger of such villainy was slight and not worth considering seriously. Monty would probably ride over as soon as he had finished his work in Pahranagat Valley; and when he did, Gary meant to tell him all about it and take him up and show him the claim.
Monty would keep the secret for him, he was sure. He did not want Patricia to know anything about it until he was sure that the vein was not going to peter out before it yielded at least a modest fortune.
One night soon after he had made these elaborate arrangements, Gary woke sweating from a nightmare. He was so sure that James Blaine Hawkins was rummaging through his suit case, looking for the information of the mine, that he swung out of bed, kicking viciously with both feet. When they failed to land upon the man he believed was there, Gary drew back and kicked again at a different angle.
Not a sound save Gary’s breathing disturbed the midnight quiet of the cabin. Gary waited, wondering foolishly if he had been dreaming after all. He leaned and reached for his trousers, found a match and lighted it. The tiny blaze flared up and showed him an empty cabin. It was a dream, then—but a disagreeably vivid one, that impressed upon Gary’s mind the thought that James Blaine Hawkins, returning while he was at work up the bluff, would be very likely to go prowling. If he found and read Gary’s explicit description of the mine and the way to find it, together with his opinion of its richness, James Blaine Hawkins might be tempted to slip up there and roll a rock down on Gary.
Wherefore, Gary dragged his suit case from under the bed, found the papers, lighted another match and burned them. When that was done to his satisfaction, he lay down again and went to sleep. Books might be written—and possibly have been—about hunches, their origin and value, if any. Gary’s nightmare and the strong impulse afterward to guard against danger, took a wrong turning somewhere. He provided against a danger which did not exist in reality and felt an instant relief. And soon after sunrise he shouldered a full canteen, stuffed a five-pound lard bucket as full of lunch as he could cram it, got a handful of fresh candles and went blithely up the bluff to meet the greatest danger that had ever threatened him in his life.
He had driven the crosscut in a good twelve feet by now, and he was proud of his work. The vein seemed to be widening a bit, and the values still held. Already he had an ore dump which he estimated should bring Patricia almost as much money as she had paid for Johnnywater. He hoped there was more than that in the dump, but he was clinging to the side of conservatism. If the claim yielded no more than that, he could still feel that he had done Patricia a real service. To-day he carried his gold dust knotted in a handkerchief in his pocket, lest his nightmare should come true and James Blaine Hawkins should return to rob him. He even carried the mortar and pestle to the shed and threw them down in a corner with the gold pan tucked under some steel traps, so that no one could possibly suspect that they had been used lately.
He was thinking of James Blaine Hawkins while he drilled the four holes in the face of the crosscut. He stopped to listen and looked down the cañon and out as far as he could see into the desert when he went up into the hot sunlight to get the powder, fuse and caps from the cave to load the holes. As he sat in the shade crimping the caps on the four lengths of fuse, a vague uneasiness grew upon him.
“I got a hunch he’ll turn up to-day—and maybe bring some strong-arm guy with him,” Gary said to himself. “Just so he doesn’t happen along in time to hear the shots up here, I don’t know what harm he could do. He never could find this place, even if he got some hint there was a mine somewhere. Anyway, I could hear him drive up the cañon, all right.”
Still he was charging his mental disturbance to James Blaine Hawkins—which proves how inaccurate a “hunch” may be. He carried his four loads to the incline shaft and let himself carefully down, the explosive cuddled in one arm while he steadied himself with the other. At the bottom he noticed his second canteen lying in the full glare of the sun and moved it inside the crosscut with the other canteen and his lunch. It was an absent-minded act, since he would presently move everything outside clear of flung rocks from the blasting.
Still fighting the vague depression that seemed the aftermath of his nightmare, Gary loaded the holes with more care than usual, remembering that he was playing with death whenever he handled that old powder. He flung shovel and pick toward the opening, split the fuse ends with his knife and turned to hurry out of the shaft.
He faced the opening just in time to see it close as a great bowlder dropped into the shaft, followed by the clatter of smaller rocks.
Instinctively Gary recoiled and got the smell of the burning fuse in his nostrils. Without conscious thought of what he must do, he whipped out his knife, tore open a blade and cut the fuses, one by one, close to the rock. He stamped upon them—though they were harmless, writhing there on the floor of the crosscut until the powder was exhausted.
Not until the last fuse stopped burning did Gary approach the blocked opening to see how badly he was trapped. A little rift of sunlight showed at the upper right-hand corner. The rest was black, solid rock. Gary felt the rock all over with his hands, then stooped and lifted his lunch and the two canteens and set them farther back in the crosscut, as if he feared they might yet be destroyed.
He moved the candle here and there above the floor, looking desperately for his pick and shovel. But the heave he had given them had sent them out into the shaft directly in the path of the falling bowlder. He searched the crosscut for other tools, and found his single-jack leaning against the wall where he had dropped it; beside it were two of the shorter drills, the bits nicked and dull.
He returned to the closed mouth of the crosscut and attempted to pry away the bowlder, using the longer of the two drills thrust into the opening as a lever. He could as easily have tilted the rim rock itself. Sunlight streamed in through a crack possibly eighteen inches long and the width of his hand, but except for the ventilation it gave, the opening merely served to emphasize the hopelessness of his prison.
He looked at his watch mechanically, and saw that it was just fifteen minutes past twelve. He had timed his work, like all good miners, so that he could “shoot” at noon and let the smoke clear away from the workings while he rested and ate his lunch. He did not feel like eating now. He did not feel like much of anything. His brain refused to react immediately to the full horror of his position.
That he, Gary Marshall, should actually be entombed alive in Patricia’s gold mine—“The Pat Connolly” mine—was a thing too incredible for his mind to grasp. He simply could not take the thing seriously.
The unreasoning belief that Mills would presently shout, “Cut!” and Gary would walk out into the sunlight, persisted for a time. The dramatic element loomed high above the grim reality of it. The thing was too ghastly to be true. To believe in the horrible truth of it would drive a man crazy, he told himself impatiently.
He put his face to the widest part of the opening between the bowlder and the wall, and shouted again and again frenziedly.
“Monty! Oh-h, Monty!” he called.
The pity of it was that Monty Girard was at that moment jogging into the mouth of Johnnywater Cañon, swinging his feet boyishly in the stirrups and humming a little song as he rode, his thoughts with Gary, wondering how he was “making it” these days.