B. M. Bower

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Patricia’s mental surgery had driven the lance deep into his pride and self-esteem, which in a handsome young man of twenty-four is quite as sensitive to pain as an eyeball. Patricia had omitted the mental anesthetic of a little flattery, and she had twisted the knife sickeningly. Painted eyelashes and painted lips nauseated Gary quite suddenly; but scarcely more than did the thought of that ranch of a hundred cattle in a Nevada desert, which Patricia had beggared herself to buy. ”

“ While Patricia slept exhaustedly in the cabin below, Gary babbled of many things in the crosscut. He awoke, believing he had dreamed that an automobile drove into the cañon the evening before. Nevertheless he decided that, since there was no hope of cutting away the granite wall with his knife, or of lifting the bowlder, Atlas-like, on his shoulders and heaving it out of the incline shaft, he might as well use what strength and breath he had in shouting.
“About one chance in ten thousand that anybody would hear me,” he told himself. “But getting out alone is a darned sight longer shot. ”

“ Monty had spent a lot of time during those three weeks in mulling over in his mind the peculiar chain of circumstances that had dragged Gary to Johnnywater. What bond it was that held him there, Monty would have given much to know. He was sure that Gary disliked the place, and that he hated to stay there alone. It seemed unreasonable that any normal young man would punish himself like that from sheer stubbornness; yet Gary would have had Monty believe that he was staying to spite Patricia. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From high up on the bluff somewhere the Voice answered him mockingly, shouting again and again a monotonous, eerie call. There was no other sound for a time, and Monty went into the cabin to see if he could find there some clue to Gary’s absence.
Little things bear a message plain as print to those dwellers of the wilderness who depend much upon their eyes and their ears. The cabin told Monty with absolute certainty that Gary had not planned an absence of more than a few hours at most. ”

“ I had the money to buy this cattle ranch at Johnnywater—but of course I knew that I should be perfectly helpless with it alone. I don’t know the business of raising cattle, except that I know the most popular kinds of stock food and the prices and freight rates to various points. But you were born on a cattle ranch, Gary, and I knew that you could make a success of it. I knew that you could go and take charge of the ranch, and put the investment on a paying basis; which is a lot better than just leaving that money in the bank, drawing four and a half per cent. ”

“ James Blaine Hawkins frowned. He felt so much the master of Johnnywater that he resented the sight of a trespasser who looked so much at home as did Gary Marshall. He grunted a gruff hello in response to Gary’s greeting, drove on into the dooryard and killed his engine.
Gary turned back and came close to the car. He was rather quick at reading a man’s mood from little, indefinable signs which would have been overlooked by another man. Something in the general attitude of James Blaine Hawkins spelled insolence which Gary instinctively challenged. ”

“ This was meant as a trenchant warning to Gary Marshall that he need not trouble himself any further concerning Patricia’s investment nor about Patricia herself, for that matter.
Patricia paid the display ad rate and marched out, feeling as irrevocably committed to cynical maidenhood as if she had taken the veil. Men as such were weak, vain creatures who thought to hold the heart of a woman in the curve of an eyelash. Meaning, needless to say, Gary Marshall’s eyelash which should not longer hold the heart of Patricia Connolly. ”

“ I might just point out, however, that making a living by expressing the emotions of men in stories is no worse than pounding a typewriter for a living. What’s the difference whether you sell your profile or your fingers? And what do you think——”
“I think it’s ten o’clock, Gary Marshall, and I’ve said what I have to say and there’s no argument, because I simply won’t argue. I suppose you’ll need sleep if you still have to be at the studio at seven o’clock in the morning so that you can get into your painted eyebrows and painted eyelashes and painted lips for the day’s smirk.” ”

“ Golly, grandma! I wish I’d saved half of that shortcake to eat after a while. Now I’m so full I can’t swallow a mouthful of smoke. What’s the surprise, kid? Don’t hold the suspense till the interest flags—that’s bad business. Makes the story drag.”
“Why, I’m telling you, Gary!” Patricia opened her eyes at him in a way that would have brought any movie queen a raise in salary. “It’s just that you’re going to have a chance to live up to what’s really in you. You’re going to manage a cattle ranch, dear. Not a real big one—yet. But you’ll have the fun of seeing it grow.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now that the cañon held a potential fortune, Gary could appreciate its picturesque setting and could contemplate with pleasure the prospect of spending long summers there with Patricia. He would locate sufficient claims to protect the cañon from an influx of strangers, and they would have it for their own special little corner of the world. It is astonishing how prosperity will change a man’s point of view.
Six feet into the crosscut, Gary’s round of holes shot unexpectedly through hard rock into a close-packed mass of broken malapi. ”

“ I’ve packed my pyjamas every morning and unpacked them every night. I’ve got as much faith as the pinto cat—but it don’t get me a darn bit more than it gets her. Packing my pyjamas and waiting for Monty Girard is just about as satisfactory as the cat’s rubbing up against nothing. You’d think she’d get fed up on that sort of thing, but she don’t. Just before I started to write, she trotted toward the door looking up and purring like she does when I come in. Only nobody came in. You wouldn’t notice it if there was anybody else around. Being alone makes it creepy. ”

“ Patricia, however, was not to be convinced. For every argument of Gary’s she found another to combat it. She repeated more than once the old range slogan that you simply can’t lose money in cattle. She told Gary that here was an opportunity, sent by a watchful Providence, for him to make good in a really worth-while business; and urged upon him the theory that pioneering brings out the best qualities in a man.
She attacked furiously Gary’s ambition to become a screen star, reminding him how cheap and paltry is that success which is based only upon a man’s good looks ”

“ 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 would not look up from his work, though he knew that Monty was eyeing him steadily over the sweaty backs of the horses.
“I’d kill that damned cat if I was you,” Monty exploded with a venom altogether foreign to his natural manner. “Waddy’d never let it near the house. He never did and I never knowed why till the other day.”
Gary had one expression which usually silenced all argument. Patricia called it his stubborn smile. Dead men who have gone out fighting sometimes wear that same little smile frozen immutably upon their features. It was that smile which answered Monty Girard. ”

“ He had filled the feed box for the chickens, had given the cat a farewell talk, and locked his pyjamas into his suit case. The rest of the day he spent in waiting.
One bit of movie training helped him now. By the time an actor has reached stardom, he knows how to sit and wait; doing nothing, thinking nothing in particular, gossiping a little, perhaps, but waiting always. Gary had many a time sat around killing time for hours at a stretch, that he might work for fifteen minutes on a scene. Waiting for Monty, then, was not such a hardship that second day. ”

“ Gary Marshall can go on smirking the rest of his life if he wants to. I’m sure it’s absolutely immaterial to me.”
Gary Marshall was so absolutely immaterial to Patricia that she couldn’t sleep nights, but lay awake telling herself about his absolute immateriality. She was so pleased over her agreement with James Blaine Hawkins that her boss twice stopped his dictation to ask her if she were sick or in trouble. On both occasions Patricia’s glance turned him red in the face. And her “Certainly not” gave the poor man a guilty feeling that he must have insulted her somehow. ”

“ Faith was a methodical cat and a self-reliant cat. She loved her milk breakfast and her little talk with Gary afterward. Then she would head straight for the creek, cross it and go bounding away up the bluff. She always took the same direction, and Gary had sometimes wondered why. Of course, she hunted birds and kangaroo rats and mice; she was an expert huntress. Gary thought she must keep a private game preserve up on the bluff somewhere. However that might be, Faith was off for her daily prowl on the bluff and would not show up again at the cabin until noon or later. ”

“ Love adapts itself to strange conditions when it must, and men and maids never find it less alluring. Eight days Gary had been imprisoned in the crosscut, and thought it a lifetime of misery. Yet the four days which he remained still a prisoner, but with Patricia perched upon the bowlder practically all of the time, the entombment became an adventure, something to tell about afterward as a bit of red-blooded pioneering that seldom falls to the lot of men nowadays.
It is true that Monty was there, pecking away at the bowlder with single-jack and gadget much of the time ”

“ Gary finally thought of a way out. He told the sheriff that, since there was nothing to be done at present to release him, he would suggest that they investigate the grave under the juniper. He said he thought they might be able to identify the remains of a man which he had buried there.
They took the bait and went trooping down the bluff again to do their full duty. And the last hat-crown had no more than disappeared when Patricia again leaned forward and put her face to the opening, this time without being asked.
There is nothing in the world like love, is there? ”

“ Once again, while Gary watched her, the cat looked up at that invisible point the height of a man from the floor. She finished her milk, licked her lips satisfiedly and got up. She glanced at Gary, glanced again toward the bunk, arched her back, walked deliberately over and curved her body against nothing at all, purring her contented best. ”

“ James Blaine Hawkins did not look Patricia in the eyes and actually plan to rob her of Johnnywater, but he did sit there and wonder who would have the best title to the place, if he went and lived there for a year or two, and Patricia failed to live there at all. To James Blaine Hawkins it seemed but common justice that the man who lived on a ranch so isolated, and braved the hardships of the wilderness, should acquire unqualified title to the land. ”

“ Gary shrugged his shoulders expressively and lifted his eyebrows.
“What would you say was the matter with it?” he countered. “I know that one man disappeared here very mysteriously. An Indian, so they tell me, heard a Voice calling, up on the bluff. He died soon afterwards. And I know Waddell was in a fair way to go crazy from staying here alone. But as to what ails the place—one man’s guess is as good as another man’s.” He lighted his cigarette. “I’ve quit guessing,” he added grimly.
“You think the cabin’s haunted?” James Blaine Hawkins asked him reluctantly. ”