“HOW WILL YOU TAKE YOUR MILLIONS?”
“Johnnywater Cañon,
“On a Dark and Gloomy Night.
“My Princess Pat:
“You are the possessor of a possession of which you wittest not. You
have a ghost. Wire Conan Doyle, Sir Oliver Lodge and others of their
ilk. Ask them what is the best recipe for catching a Voice. The gink
up on the bluff that does so much vocal practice is not a gink--he’s
a spook. He’s up there vocaling right now, doing his spookish
heckest to give me the willies.
“Pat, did you send me out here just from curiosity, to see if I’d go
goofy? Tut, tut! This is no place for a flabby-souled young man;
broad shoulders, my dear girl, don’t amount to a darn in grappling
with a man-size Voice. I believe you did, you little huzzy. I
remember you distinctly mentioned howling on a hill, and my sitting
in the cabin listening to it. Great idea you had. I’m sitting here
listening. What am I supposed to do next?
“You also indicated business of listening to a horse champing hay in
a stable. Well, I have a horse at last, but the property man
overlooked the sod-roofed stable. Not having the prop in which my
horse should champ, he’s picketed up the cañon, and he’s supposed to
be champing sagebrush or grass or something. He isn’t doing it
though. He absolutely refuses to follow direction. He’s up there
going ‘MMMH-_hmmm-Hmmm_-hm-hm-hm!!!!’ I’m sorry, Pat, but that’s
exactly what he’s doing--as close as it can be put into human
spelling. He can’t feature this cañon, honey. I suspect he’s flabby
souled, too.
“He wants to chase off with the rest of the bunch about ten or
fifteen miles. Nobody loves this cañon except the psychic cat and
the two pigs. And the pigs don’t love it any more; not since I made
a rock corral and waylaid the little devils when they went snooping
in there after some stuff I put in a trough. I baited the trap, you
see--oh, this gigantic brain of mine has been hitting on all two
cylinders lately!--and then I hid. Lizards crawled over me, and the
sun blistered the back of my neck while I waited for those two
brutes to walk into the foreground. Animal pictures are hard to get,
as you may have heard while you were enduring a spasm of Handsome
Gary’s shop talk. Cut. Iris in Gary sneaking up with the board gate
he’d artcrafted the day before. So the pigs don’t love Handsome Gary
any more, and they’re spending most of their spare time talking
about me behind my back and hunting for a soft place where they can
run a drift under my perfectly nice rock fence, and then stope up to
the surface and beat it, registering contempt. I’ll call ’em shoats
if they don’t behave.
“I scythed some alfalfa to-day, Pat. Put on a swell rural comedy,
featuring Handsome Gary making side-swipes at his heels. It was a
scream, I reckon. But I came within an inch of scything Faith, only
she’s a wizard at jumping over rocks and things, and she did as
pretty a side-slip as you ever saw, and made her get-away. I’ve
wondered since--would I have had two pinto cats, or only one psychic
Voice? I mean one more psychic Voice. This one up on the bluff used
to belong to Steve Carson, according to the yarn the Piutes told me.
He’d have made a great director, if the rest of him measured up to
his lung power. The Piutes say he faded out very mysteriously, five
years ago, leaving his holler behind him. I’m afraid folks didn’t
like him very well. At any rate his Voice is darned unpopular. I
can’t say it makes any great hit with me, either. Though it’s not so
bad, at that. The main trouble seems to be not having any man to go
with the Voice. The Piutes couldn’t feature it at all. They wouldn’t
drive the horses into the corral, even. I had to double for them
when they got the bunch down there at the mouth of the cañon. Jazzed
around for two hours on an Injun pony with a gait like a pile
driver, getting your horses into your corral. You seem to have four
or five fair imitations, Pat. The rest are the bunk, if you ask me.
Not broken and not worth breaking. Don’t even look good to eat.
“There is one work team which I mean to give a try-out when I put on
my character part entitled, Making Hay Whether the Sun Shines or
Not. They have collar marks, and they’re old enough to be my dad’s
wedding team. Lips hang down like a mule, and hollows over their
eyes you could drop an egg in. I hate to flatter you, kid, but your
horse herd, take it by and large, is not what I’d be proud of.
You’re a wonderful girl--you got stung in several places at once.
“Haven’t seen anything yet of Monty Girard. Can’t think what’s the
matter, unless that savage Ford of his attacked him when he wasn’t
looking. It will be just as well now if he holds off till I get your
alfalfa cut and stacked. I’ll have a merry heck of a time doing it
alone. There’s about four acres, I should judge. To-morrow morning I
start in and do a one-step around the patch with that cussed scythe.
You needn’t think it’s going to be funny--not for Handsome Gary. I
tried to get the youngest Piute to double for me in the part, but
nothing doing. ‘Them holler no good,’ is what he said. Funny--I kinda
feel that way myself. Money wouldn’t tempt ’em. He spoke well of
Steve Carson, too; but he sure as heck don’t like his voice.
“What would you say, kid, if I found you a mine in here? I’ve had
the strongest hunch--I can’t explain it. I keep thinking there’s a
mine up on the bluff where that Voice is. I suppose I can trace the
idea back to that porphyry float I picked up the day after I landed
here. I found another piece yesterday, lying out here behind the
cabin. It must have been packed in from somewhere else. Pretty
rich-looking rock, kid. If I could find enough of that, you wouldn’t
need to pound out invoices and gol-darned letters about horse feed
and what to wean calves on. You could have a white mansion topping
that hill of ours, where we climb up and sit under the oak while we
build our air castles. Will we ever again? You feel farther away
than the sun, kid. I have to write just to keep my thoughts from
growing numb with the damned chill of this place. You know--I wrote
it down before. It’s hell to be wondering what you’d see if you
looked around....
“Well, if I find you a mine you can have your mansion on the hill.
Because, if the mine stacked up like the rock I found, you could
carry a million dollars around with you careless-like for spending
money--street-car fare, you know, and a meal at the cafeteria, and
such luxuries. And if your pocket was picked or your purse snatched
or anything, you could wave your hand airily and say, ‘Oh, that’s
all right. I’ve hundreds of millions more at home!’ How’d you like
that, old girl?
“Because I mortared a piece of that rock and panned it. It was rich,
Pat--so darned rich it scared me for a minute. I thought I had a bad
case of Desert Rat’s Delusion. I wouldn’t tell you this, kid, if I
ever meant to send the letter. I’m just writing to please myself,
not you. No, sir, I wouldn’t tell you a word about it. I’d just go
ahead and open up the mine--after I’d found it--and get about a
million dollars on the dump before I let a yip out of me. Then maybe
I’d send you word through your lawyer saying ‘I begged to inform you
that I had dug you a million dollars, and how would you have it?’
Golly grandma, if I could only find the ledge that rock came from!
“You know, Pat, you got me all wrong that night. What made me so
doggoned sore was to think how you’d handed over five thousand
dollars to a gink, just on the strength of his say-so. It showed on
the face of it that it was no investment for you to make. It wasn’t
that I am so stuck on the movies. Heck knows I’m not. But I sure am
stuck on the job that will pay me the money I can get from working
in the movies. I’ll rent my profile any time--for a hundred dollars a
day, and as much more as I can get. That’s what the contract would
have paid me the first year, Pat, and double that the second if I
made good. So I was dead willing to put paint on my eyebrows and
paint on my lips, and let my profile--if you insist that’s all I got
over on the screen--earn a little home for my Princess Pat and me.
“But if I could find a mine to match that chunk of rock, the studios
would never see Handsome Gary--never no more. I’d kiss my own girl on
the lips--for love. Honest, Pat, those kisses, that looked so real on
the screen and made you so sore, were awfully faked. I never told
you. I guess I’m a mean cuss. But I never touched a girl’s lips,
Lady, after I met you. I had one alibi guaranteed never to slip. I
told ’em, one and all, confidentially before we went into the scene,
that they could trust me. I swore I’d remember and not smear their
lips all over their cheeks. I said I knew girls hated that, and I’d
be careful. Then it was up to me to do some plain and fancy faking.
And when my Lady Patricia put up her chin and registered supreme
indifference, it always tickled me to see how well I’d put it over.
I always meant to tell you some time, girlie.
“I had a wild idea when I left the city that I’d maybe write down a
story I’d been framing in my mind when I was on location and waiting
between scenes. I told Mills just enough of it to get him curious to
hear the rest. He told me to write it out in scenario form and if it
was good he’d see that the company bought it. That would have been a
couple of hundred more toward our home, kid. The point is, I laid in
a lot of paper. Now that darn story’s gone stale on me and I’m using
up the paper writing letters to you that you’ll never read. As a
little blond jane in our company was always saying, ‘Isn’t life a
perfect _scream_?’ I’ll say it is.
“Your Grouchy Gary.”