“I DON’T BELIEVE IN SPOOKS”
A silence significant, almost sinister, fell. Gary rose from the
doorsill, took a restless step or two and turned, so that he faced
Monty, and the open doorway. He looked past Monty, into the cabin. A
quick glance, almost a furtive one. Then he laughed, meeting Monty’s
inquiring eyes mockingly.
“Seen anything? No. Nothing I shouldn’t see, at least. Why?” He
laughed again, a mirthless kind of laugh. “Did Waddell throw in a
spook along with the Voice?”
“Waddy got powerful oneasy,” Monty observed, choosing his words with
some care. “Waddy claimed he seen Steve Carson frequent. I didn’t
know----Say! Did the Piutes tell yuh-all how Steve Carson looked?”
Gary’s eyes slid away from Monty’s searching look.
“No. I didn’t ask. I just got a notion that Waddell maybe looked
like that.” He lifted his chin, his glance once more passing Monty
by to go questing within the cabin.
“I don’t believe in spooks,” he stated clearly, a defiant note
creeping into his voice in spite of him. “That’s the bunk. When
people start seeing spooks, it’s time they saw a doctor and had
their heads X-rayed. I’ll tell you what I think, Monty. I think that
when we check out, we stay _out_. Get me? I can’t feature giving
death all these encores--when, damn it, the audience is sitting
hunched down into its chairs with its hands over its faces, afraid
to look. If we clapped and stamped and whistled to get ’em out
before the curtain, then I’d say they had some excuse.
“I tell you, Monty, I’ve got a lot of respect for the way this Life
picture is being directed. And it don’t stand to reason that a
director who’s on to his job is going to let a character that was
killed off in the first reel come slipping back into the film in the
fourth reel. I know what _that_ would mean at Cohen’s. It would mean
that some one in the cutting room would get the gate. No, sir,
that’s bad technique--and the Big Director up there won’t stand for
any cut-backs that don’t help the story along.” His eyes left
Monty’s face to send another involuntary glance through the open
door. “So all this hokum about ghosts is pure rot to me.”
“Well, I ain’t superstitious none myself,” Monty repeated somewhat
defensively. “I never seen anything--but one time I was here when
Waddy thought _he_ seen something. He tried to point it out to me.
But I couldn’t see nothin’. I reckon you’re right. And I’m shore
glad yuh-all feel that way.”
The spotted cat, having dined well upon a kangaroo rat caught down
by the creek, was sitting near them calmly washing her face. She got
up, looked up into the open doorway, and mewed a greeting. Then she
trotted to meet--a memory, perhaps. She stopped three feet from the
doorstep and stood there purring, her body arched with a rubbing
movement.
Monty Girard turned his head and stared at the cat over his
shoulder. Three deep creases formed between Gary’s eyebrows while he
also watched the pantomime. The cat turned, looked up ingratiatingly
(still, perhaps, clinging to a memory) and trotted away toward the
creek exactly as if she were following some one. Monty got up and
the eyes of the two men met unsmilingly.
“Oh, heck,” said Gary, shrugging his shoulders. “Come on and see the
hay I’ve put up!”
They walked in a constrained silence to the alfalfa field. Monty
cast a critical eye over the raggedy edge of the cutting. He grinned
slowly, tilting his head sidewise.
“Whereabouts did yuh-all learn to swing a scythe?” he asked
banteringly. “I reckon yuh could do it a heap better on a hawse.”
“But the darned horse idea blew up on me. Did the balloon stunt. You
get me, don’t you?” Gary’s laugh hinted at overstrained nerves. “I
wish you’d been here then, Monty. Why, I didn’t dig any grave. I had
to excavate a cellar to plant him in.” He waved a hand toward the
haycocks. “How do you like the decorations? You will observe that
they are somewhat larger than were being worn by meadows last year.
These are the new 1921 models, specially designed with the
stream-line effect, with a view to shedding rain. Also hail, snow
and any other form of moisture. They are particularly good where
horses are unavailable for hauling hay to a stack.”
“I’ll run in the horses to-morrow,” Monty volunteered casually. “The
two of us together ought to get that hay hauled in a day, all right.
Spuds is lookin’ good. I reckon this ain’t your first attempt at
farming.”
“The first and the last--I’ll tell a waiting world. Say, I forgot you
might be hungry. If this new hay won’t give your horse acute
gastritis, why not tie him down by the cabin and carry him a forkful
or two? I can’t feature this corral stuck off here by itself where
we can’t keep an eye on it. Still, if you say it’s all right, we’ll
put him in.”
Monty said it was all right, and Gary did not argue. His spirits had
reacted to the stimulus of Monty’s presence, and he was conscious
now and then of a heady feeling, as if he had been drinking
champagne. His laughter was a bit too frequent, a shade too loud to
be perfectly normal. The mental pendulum, having been tilted too far
in one direction, was swinging quite as far the other way in an
effort to adjust itself to normalcy.
Monty Girard was not of an analytical temperament, though
circumstance had forced him to observe keenly as a matter of
self-protection. He apprehended Gary’s mood sufficiently to let him
set the tempo of their talk. Gary, he remembered, had been two weeks
alone in Johnnywater Cañon. By his own account he was wholly
unaccustomed to isolation of any degree. Monty, therefore, accepted
Gary’s talkative mood as a perfectly natural desire to make up for
lost time.
But there was a reserve in Gary’s talk, nevertheless, an invisible
boundary which he would not pass and which held Monty Girard within
certain well-defined conversational limits. It seemed to pass
directly through Gary’s life at Johnnywater, and to shut off
completely the things which Monty wanted most to know. Of all the
trivial, surface incidents of those two weeks, Gary talked
profusely. His amusing efforts to corral the pigs and keep them
there; his corraling of the horses on the old Piute’s hard-gaited
pony; his rural activities with hoe and irrigating shovel; all these
things he described in great detail. But of his mental life in the
cañon he would not speak.
But Monty Girard was observing, and he watched Gary rather closely
during the three days which he spent at Johnnywater. He saw Gary’s
lips tighten when, on the second evening just after supper, the
Voice shouted unexpectedly from high up on the bluff. He saw a
certain look creep into Gary’s eyes, and the three little creases
show themselves suddenly between his eyebrows. But the next moment
Gary was looking at Monty and laughing as though he had not heard
the Voice.
Monty Girard, having eyes that saw nearly everything that came
within their range of vision, saw also this: He saw Gary frequently
rise, walk across the cabin and stand with his back leaning against
the wall, facing the place where he had been sitting. He would
continue his laughing monologue, perhaps--but his eyes would glance
now and then with reluctance toward that place, as if he were
testing an impression. After a bit of that, Gary would return and
sit down again, resuming his old careless manner. The strange,
combative look would leave his eyes and his forehead would smooth
itself.
Gary never spoke of these things, and Monty Girard respected his
silence. But he felt that, although he knew just what the pigs had
done and how long it took to corral the horses and how many blisters
it took to “scythe” the hay, he would remain in ignorance of Gary’s
real life in Johnnywater Cañon, the life that was changing him
imperceptibly but nevertheless as surely as old age creeps upon a
man who has passed the peak of his activities.
“Yuh-all better ride on over with me to my camp and stop there till
you get a chance to ride in to town,” Monty said, when they were
unhooking the team from the hay wagon after hauling in the last load
of alfalfa. “Yuh can turn the pigs loose again and let ’em take
their chances on the coyotes, same as they was doin’ when yuh come.
Some one’s liable to come drivin’ in to my camp any day. But,” he
added significantly, “yuh’ll set a long time before anybody comes to
Johnnywater.”
“That’s all right,” Gary said easily, pulling the harness off the
horse he was attending to, and beginning to unbuckle the collar
strap, stiff and unruly from disuse. “I’ll just stick here for
awhile, anyway. Er--the potatoes need a lot of man-with-the-hoe
business.” His fingers tugged at the collar strap. 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.
Monty looked at him again, puzzled and more than slightly uneasy.
“Yuh better come along with me,” he said again, persuasively, as one
urges the sick to follow the doctor’s orders.
“No--I think I’ll just stick around for awhile.” Having removed the
collar, Gary gave the horse a slap on the shoulder that sent it off
seeking a soft spot on which to roll.
“Well, for God’s sake, kill that cat! By gosh, it’s enough to drive
a fellow crazy. It’s wrong in the head and--and yuh know it might
have hydrophoby.”
Gary laughed. “Why, I couldn’t keep house without the pinto cat!
That’s great business. Furnishes atmosphere and--er--entertainment.”
It was perfectly apparent that Gary had some secret reason for
staying. Something which he would not tell Monty Girard, although
the two had become rather good friends. Monty’s face clouded; but
Gary slapped him reassuringly on the shoulder.
“Tell you what you do, old fellow. You draw me a map so I can find
my way over to your place later on. And if one of these horses is
any good under the saddle, I’ll keep him in the corral so I’ll have
something to ride. Now I’ve got hay, the beggar ought to make out
all right.”
Monty had to be content with that and rode away to his own camp
somewhat reluctantly, leaving Gary standing in the doorway of the
cabin, his hands braced against the frame on either side, smoking
and staring after him a bit wistfully.