CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“GARY MARSHALL MYSTERIOUSLY MISSING”
By riding as late as he dared that night, and letting the horses rest until daylight the next morning, and then pushing them forward at top desert speed—which was a steady trail trot—Monty reached the first ranch house a little after noon the next day. In all that time he had not seen a human being, though he had hoped to be overtaken or to meet some car on the road.
Nerve-racking delay met him at the ranch. The woman and two small children were there, but the man (Ben Thompson was his name) had left that morning for Las Vegas in the car. Monty was too late by about four hours.
He ate dinner there, fed his horses hay and grain, watered them the last minute and started out again, still hoping that some car would be traveling that way. But luck was against him and he was forced to camp that night thirty miles out from Las Vegas.
Long before daylight he was up and on his way again, to take advantage of the few hours before the intense heat of the day began. Jazz was going lame, traveling barefooted at the forced pace Monty required of him. It was nearly five o’clock when he limped into town with the dusty pack roped upon his sweat-encrusted back.
Monty went directly to the depot and climbed the steep stairs to the telegraph office, his spur rowels burring along the boards. He leaned heavily upon the shelf outside the grated window while he wrote two messages with a hand that shook from exhaustion.
The first was addressed to the sheriff of Nye County, notifying him that a man had disappeared in Johnnywater Cañon and that it looked like murder. The other read as follows:
“P. Connolly,
Cons. Grain & Milling Co.,
Los Angeles, Calif.
“Gary Marshall mysteriously missing from Johnnywater evidence points to foul play suspect Hawkins wire instructions.
“M. Girard.”
Monty regretted the probable shock that message would give to Patricia, but he reasoned desperately that she would have to know the worst anyway, and that a telegram never permits much softening of a blow. She might know something about Hawkins that would be helpful. At any rate, he knew of no one so intimately concerned as Patricia.
He waited for his change, asked the operator to rush both messages straight through, and clumped heavily down the stairs. He remounted and made straight for the nearest stable and turned the horses over to the proprietor himself, who he knew would give them the best care possible. After that he went to a hotel, got a room with bath, took a cold plunge and crawled between the hot sheets with the window as wide open as it would go, and dropped immediately into the heavy slumber of complete mental and physical exhaustion.
While Monty was refreshing himself with the cold bath, Gary, squatted on his heels against the wall of his dungeon, was fingering half of a hoarded biscuit and trying to decide whether he had better eat it now and turn a bold face toward starvation, or put it back in the lard bucket and let the thought of it torture him for a few more hours.
The telegram to the sheriff at Tonopah arrived while the sheriff was hunting down a murderer elsewhere. His deputy read the wire and speared it face down upon a bill-hook already half filled with a conglomerate mass of other communications. The deputy was not inclined to attach much significance to the message. He frequently remarked that if the sheriff’s office got all fussed up over every yarn that came in, the county would be broke inside a month paying mileage and salary to a dozen deputies. Monty had not said that a man had been murdered. He merely suspected something of the sort. The deputy slid down deeper into the armchair he liked best, cocked his feet higher on the desk and filled his pipe. Johnnywater Cañon and the possible fate of the man who had disappeared from there entered not at all into his somnolent meditations.
The telegram to Patricia reached the main office in Los Angeles after five o’clock. The clerk who telephones the messages called up the office of the Consolidated Grain & Milling Company and got no reply after repeated ringing. Patricia’s telegram was therefore held until office hours the next morning. A messenger boy delivered it last, on his first trip out that way with half-a-dozen messages. The new stenographer was not at first inclined to take it, thinking there must be some mistake. The new manager was in conference with an important customer and she was afraid to disturb him with a matter so unimportant. And since she had quarreled furiously with the bookkeeper just the day before, she would not have spoken to him for anything on earth. So Patricia’s telegram lay on the desk until nearly noon.
At last the manager happened to stroll into the outer office and picked up the yellow envelope which had not been opened. Being half in love with Patricia—in spite of a wife—he knew at once who “P. Connolly” was. He was a conscientious man though his affections did now and then stray from his own hearthside. He immediately called a messenger and sent the telegram back to the main office with forwarding instructions.
At that time, Gary was standing before the sunny slit at the end of the crosscut, pounding doggedly with the single-jack at the corner of the rock wall. He had given up attempting to use the dulled drill as a gadget. He could no longer strike with sufficient force to make the steel bite into the rock, nor could he land the blow accurately on the head of the drill.
The day before he had managed to crack off a piece of rock twice the width of his hand; and though it had broken too far inside the crosscut to accomplish much in the way of enlarging the opening, Gary was nevertheless vastly encouraged. He could now thrust out his hand to the elbow. He could feel the sun shine hot upon it at midday. He could feel the warm wind in his face when he held it pressed close against the open space. He could even smooth Faith’s sleek head when she scrambled upon the bowlder and peered in at him round-eyed and anxious. The world that day had seemed very close.
But to-day, while the telegram to Patricia was loitering in Los Angeles, the sky over Johnnywater was filled thick with clouds. Daylight came gray into the deep gloom of the crosscut. And Gary could not swing a steady blow, but pounded doggedly at the rock with quick, short-arm strokes like a woodpecker hammering at the bole of a dead tree.
He was obliged to stop often and rest, leaning against the wall with his hunger-sharpened profile like a cameo where the light shone in upon him. He would stand there and pant for a while and then lift the four-pound hammer—grown terribly heavy, lately—and go on pounding unavailingly at the rock.