Gary had prospected pretty thoroughly the whole cañon, following the
theory that some one--he felt that it was probably Steve Carson--had
carried that rich, gold-bearing rock down to the cabin. Waddell had
left neither chemicals nor appliances by which he could test any of
the mineralized rock he found; but Gary was looking for one
particular kind, the porphyry that carried free gold.
Greater than the loneliness, stronger than his dread of the cañon
and the cabin, was his desire to find more of that gold-bearing
rock. It would not take much of it to make Pat’s investment in
Johnnywater more than profitable. He even climbed to the top of the
butte--a heart-breaking effort accomplished at the risk of his neck
on the sheer wall of the rim rock. There was no means of knowing
just where that porphyry had come from. In some prehistoric eruption
it might have been thrown for miles, though Gary did not believe
that it had been. The top of the bluff gave no clue whatever. Malapi
bowlders strewed much of the surface with outcroppings of country
rock. Certainly there was no sign of mineral up there. He tramped
the butte for miles, however, and spent two days in doing it. Then,
satisfied that the porphyry must be somewhere in the cañon, he
renewed his search on the slope.
Prospecting here was quite as difficult, because so much of the
upper slopes was covered with an overburden of the malapi that
formed the rim rock. Portions of the rim would break and slide when
the storms beat upon it. Considerable areas of loose rock had formed
during the centuries of wear and tear, and if there had been mineral
outcroppings they were as effectually hidden as if they had never
come to the surface at all. But a strain of persistence which Gary
had inherited from pioneering forebears held him somewhat doggedly
to the search.
He reasoned that he had more time than he knew what to do with, and
if a fortune were hidden away in this cañon, it would be inexcusable
for him to mope through the days without making any systematic
effort to find it. Patricia deserved the best fortune the world had
to bestow. To find one for her would, he told himself whimsically,
wipe out the stain of owning a profile and a natural marcel wave
over his temples. Pat might possibly forgive even his painted
eyebrows and painted lashes and painted lips, if he found her a gold
mine.
So he tramped and scrambled and climbed from one end of the cañon
walls to the other, and would not hint to Monty Girard what it was
that held him in Johnnywater Cañon. He would not even put his hopes
on paper in the long, lonely evenings when he wrote to Patricia.
After the jibing letter concerning the millions she might have if
she owned a mine as rich as the rock he had found behind the cabin,
Gary had not put his search into words even when he talked to Faith.
He found himself thinking more and more about Steve Carson. The
weak-souled Waddell he had come practically to ignore. Waddell had
left no impress upon the cañon, at least, so far as Gary was
concerned. And that in spite of the fact that he was walking about
in Waddell’s boots and trousers, wearing Waddell’s hat, tending
Waddell’s pigs. Walking in Waddell’s boots, Gary wondered about
Steve Carson, speculated upon his life and his hopes and the things
he had put away in his past when he came to Johnnywater to live
alone, wholly apart from his fellows. Steve Carson’s hands had built
the cabin between the two piñons. Steve Carson--Gary did not attempt
any explanation of why he knew it was so--had brought the
gold-bearing rock to the cabin. A prospector of sorts, he must have
been, to have found gold-bearing rock in that cañon.
It was during the forenoon after Gary had returned from Kawich that
he obeyed a sudden, inexplicable impulse to follow Faith, the
mottled cat.
Ever since Gary had come to Johnnywater he had seen Faith go off
across the creek after breakfast. Usually she returned in the course
of three or four hours, and frequently she brought some small rodent
or a bird home with her. Gary had been faintly amused by the pinto
cat’s regular hours and settled habits of living. He used to
compliment her upon her decorous behavior, stroking her back while
she purred on his knee, her paws tucked snugly close to her body.
On this morning Gary rose abruptly from the doorstep, and,
bareheaded, he followed Faith across the creek and up the bluff. It
was hot climbing, but Gary did not think about the heat. Indeed, he
was not consciously thinking of anything much. He was simply
following Faith up the bluff, because he had got up from the
doorstep to follow Faith.
Faith climbed up and up quite as if she knew exactly where she was
going. Gary, stopping once on a bowlder to breathe for a minute
after an unusually stiff bit of climbing, saw the cat look up in the
queer way she had of doing. In a minute she went on and Gary
followed.
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.
Gary hesitated. He was thirsty, and the rapid climb was beginning to
tell on him. He looked back down the bluff to the cool green of the
grove, and for the first time wondered why he had been such a fool
as to follow a cat away up here on a hunting trip in which he could
not possibly take any active interest or part. He told himself what
a fool he was and said he must be getting goofy himself. But when he
moved it was upward, after the cat.
He brought up at the foot of a high ledge seamed and cracked as one
would never suspect, looking up from below. It was up here somewhere
that the Voice always seemed to be located. He stopped and listened,
but the whole cañon lay in a somnolent calm under the mounting sun.
It looked as if nothing could disturb it; as if there never could be
a Voice other than the everyday voices of men. While he stood there
wiping his forehead and panting with the heat and the labor of
climbing, the red rooster down in the grove began to crow lustily.
The sound came faintly up to Gary, linking him lightly to
commonplace affairs.
A little distance away the cat had curled herself down in a tiny
hollow at the edge of the slide. Gary made his way over to her. She
opened one eye and regarded him sleepily, gave a lazy purr or two
and settled herself again more comfortably. Gary saw, from certain
small scratchings in the gravel, that the pinto cat had made this
little nest for herself. She had not been hunting at all. She had
come to a spot with which she was very familiar.