Gary decided offhand that he had been neatly sold. He sat down on
the loose rubble near Faith and made himself a smoke. The grove and
the cabin were hidden from him by the narrow little ridge that
looked perfectly smooth from the cañon bottom. But the rest of the
cañon--the corral, the potato patch, the alfalfa--lay blocked out in
miniature far below him. He stared down upon the peaceful picture it
made and wondered why he had climbed all the way up here just
following the pinto cat. For the matter of that, his following the
cat was not half so purposeless as the cat’s coming had been.
He looked down at her curled asleep in her little hollow. It struck
him that this must have been her destination each time she crossed
the creek and started up the bluff. But why should the cat come away
up here every day? Gary did not attempt to explain the vagaries of a
cat so eccentric as Faith had proved herself to be. He wondered idly
if he were becoming eccentric also, just from constant association
with Faith.
He laughed a little to himself and picked up a piece of malapi rock;
balanced it in his hand while he thought of other things, and tossed
it down the slide. It landed ten feet below him and began rolling
farther, carrying with it a small avalanche of loose rocks. Gary
watched the slide with languid interest. Even so small a thing could
make a tiny ripple in the dead calm of the cañon that day.
The slide started by that one rock spread farther. Other rocks
loosened and went rolling down the bluff, and Gary’s eyes followed
them and went higher, watching to see where next a rock would slip
away from the mass and go rolling down. It seemed to him that the
whole slide might be easily set in motion with no more than a kick
or two at the top. He got up and began to experiment, kicking a rock
loose here and there. There was no danger to himself, since he stood
at the top of the slide. As for Faith, she had sprung up in a furry
arch at the first slithering clatter and was now viewing the scene
with extreme disfavor from the secure vantage point of a shelf on
the ledge above Gary.
In a very few minutes Gary had set the whole surface of the slide in
motion. The noise it made pleased him immensely. It served to break
that waiting silence in the cañon. When the rocks ceased rolling, he
started others. Finally he found himself standing upon firm ground
again, with an outcropping of gray quartz just below him. His eyes
fixed themselves upon the quartz in a steady stare before he dug
heels into the slope and edged down to it.
With a malapi rock bigger than his two fists he hammered off a piece
of quartz and held it in the shade of his body while he examined it
closely. He turned it this way and that, fearful of deceiving
himself by the very strength of his desire. But all the while he
knew what were those little yellow specks that gleamed in the shade.
He knelt and pounded off other pieces of the quartz and compared
them anxiously with the first. They were all identical in character:
steel gray, with here and there the specks of gold in the gray, and
the chocolate brown streaks and splotches of hematite--the “red
oxide” iron which runs as high as seventy per cent. iron. Hematite
and free gold in gray quartz----
“A prettier combination for free gold I couldn’t have made to
order!” he whispered, almost as if he were praying. “It’s good
enough for my girl’s ‘million-dollar mine’--though they _do_ get rich
off a piece of gold float in the movies!” He began to laugh
nervously. A weaker-souled man would probably have wept instead.
With the side of his foot he tore away the rubble from the quartz
outcropping. There, just where he had been kneeling, he discovered a
narrow vein of the bird’s-eye porphyry such as he had found at the
cabin. Here, then, lay the object of all his tiresome prospecting.
So far as he could judge, with only his hands and feet for digging,
the vein averaged about eight inches in width. Whether the porphyry
formed a wall for the quartz he could not tell at the surface; but
he hoped fervently that it did. With hematite, gray quartz and
bird’s-eye porphyry he would have the ideal combination for a rich,
permanent gold mine. And Pat, he reflected breathlessly, might
really have her millions after all.
He picked up what he believed to be average samples of the vein and
started back down the bluff, his imagination building air castles,
mostly for Patricia. If he dramatized the event and cast himself for
the leading man playing opposite Patricia, who was the star, surely
he had earned the right to paint rose tints across the veil that hid
his future and hers.
He had forgotten all about the cat; but when he reached the cabin,
there she was at his heels looking extremely self-satisfied and
waving her tail with a gentle air of importance. Gary laid his ore
samples on the table and stood with his hands on his hips, looking
down at Faith with a peculiar expression in his eyes. Suddenly he
smiled endearingly at the cat, stooped and picked her up, holding
her by his two hands so that he could look into her eyes.
“Doggone you, Faith, I wish to heck you could talk! I wouldn’t put
it past you to think like humans. I’ll bet you’ve been trying all
along to show me that outcropping. And I thought you were hunting
mice and birds and gophers just like a plain, ordinary cat! You
can’t tell _me_--you knew all about that gold! I’ll bet you’ve got a
name all picked out for the mine, too. But it won’t go, I’ll tell a
meddlesome world. That is, unless you’ve decided it ought to be
called ‘The Pat Connolly.’ Because that’s the way it’s going on
record, if Handsome Gary has anything to say about it--and I rather
think he has!”
Faith blinked at him and mewed understandingly. Gary wooled her a
bit and put her down, considerately smoothing down the fur he had
roughed. Faith was a forgiving cat, and she immediately began
purring under his fingers. After that she tagged him indefatigably
while he got mortar, pestle and pan, and carried them down to a
shady spot beside the creek.
Gary’s glance strayed often to the bluff while he broke bits off
each sample of quartz and dropped them into the iron mortar. Then,
with the mortar held firmly between his knees, Gary picked up the
eight-inch length of iron with the round knob on the end and began
to pulverize the ore. For a full quarter of an hour the quiet air of
the grove throbbed to the steady _pung, pung, pung_, of the iron
pestle striking upon rock particles in the deep iron bowl.
About twice in every minute, Gary would stop, dip thumb and finger
into the mortar, and bring up a pinch of pulverized rock at which he
would squint with the wholly unconscious eagerness of a small boy.
Naturally, since he was not flattening a nugget of solid gold in the
mortar, he failed to see anything except once when he caught an
unmistakable yellow gleam from a speck of gold almost half the size
of a small pinhead.
He gloated over that speck for a full minute before he shook it
carefully back into the mortar. And then you should have heard him
pound!
He was all aquiver with hope and eager expectancy when at last he
poured the pulverized quartz into the gold pan and went digging his
heels down the bank to the water. Faith came forward and stood upon
a dry rock, mewing and purring by turns, and waving her tail
encouragingly while she watched him.
Those who plod along the beaten trail toward commercial success can
scarcely apprehend the thrill of winning from nature herself the
symbol that promises fulfillment of hope and dreams coming true. The
ardency of Gary’s desire was measurable only by the depth of his
love for Patricia. For himself he had a man’s normal hunger for
achievement. To discover a gold mine here in Johnnywater Cañon, to
develop it in secret to the point where he could command what
capital he needed for the making of a real mine, that in itself
seemed to Gary a goal worth striving for. To fill Patricia’s hands
with virgin gold which he had found for her, there spoke the
primitive desire of man since the world was young; to bring the
spoils of war or the chase and lay them, proud offering of love, at
the feet of his Woman.
Gary turned and tilted the pan, tenderly as a young mother cradles
her first-born. He dipped and rocked and spilled the water carefully
over the rim; dipped and rocked and tilted again. The three deep
creases stood between his straight, dark eyebrows, but now they
betokened eager concentration upon his work. At last, he poured
clear water from the pan carefully, almost drop by drop. He tilted
the pan slowly in the sunlight and bent his head, peering sharply
into the pan. His heart seemed to be beating in his throat when he
saw the trail of tiny yellow particles following sluggishly the
spoonful of black sand when he tilted the pan.
“I’ve got it, Steve,” he exclaimed, looking up over his shoulder. He
caught his breath in the sudden realization that he was looking into
the empty sunlight. Absorbed as he had been in the gold, the felt
presence of Steve Carson looking over his shoulder had seemed
perfectly natural and altogether real.
The momentary shock sobered him. But the old dread of that felt
presence no longer assailed him as something he must combat by
feigning unconsciousness. The unreasoning impression that Steve
Carson--the mind of him--was there just behind his shoulder, watching
and sharing in his delight, persisted nevertheless. Gary caught
himself wondering if the thing was really only a prank of his
imagination. Feeling a bit foolish, but choosing to indulge the
whimsy, he stood up and turned deliberately, the pan held out before
him.
“Steve Carson, if dead people go on living and thinking, and if you
really are hanging around just out of sight but watching the game,
I’m here to say that I hope you’re glad I found this vein. And I
want to tell you right now that if there’s any money to be made out
of it, it’s going to the finest, squarest little girl in the world.
So if there is such a thing as a spirit, just take it from me
everything’s going to be on the square.”
He carried the pan up to the cabin and carefully rinsed the gold
down into a jelly glass. He made no apology to himself for the
little speech to a man dead and gone these five years. Having made
himself as clear on the subject as was diplomatic--supposing Steve
Carson’s spirit had been present and could hear--he felt a certain
relief and could lay the subject aside and devote himself to the
fascination of hunting the gold out of the hills where it had lain
buried for ages.
It occurred to him that he might find some particularly rich
specimens, mortar them by hand and pan them for Patricia. A wedding
ring made from the first gold taken and panned by hand--the hand of
Gary Marshall--from “The Pat Connolly” mine, appealed to him
irresistibly. Before he had mortared a lump of porphyry the size of
a pigeon’s egg, Gary had resolved to pan enough gold for that very
purpose. He pictured himself pulling the ring from his vest pocket
while the minister waited. He experienced a prophetic thrill of
ecstasy when he slipped the ring upon Patricia’s finger. The dreamed
sentence, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” intoned by an
imaginary minister, thrilled him to the soul.
_Pung, pung, pung!_ It wouldn’t take so very long, if he mortared
rock evenings, say, instead of killing time minute by minute playing
solitaire with the deck of cards Waddell had thumbed before him.
_Pung, pung, pung!_ He could mortar the quartz in the evenings and
pan it in the morning before he went to work. _Pung, pung, pung,
pung!_ He would hunt up a cow’s horn and fix it as he had seen old
prospectors do, so that he could blow the sand from the panned gold
and carry it unmixed to the jeweler. _Pung, pung!_ The porphyry
sample was fine as corn meal under the miniature stamp-mill of
Gary’s pounding.
He was mighty careful of that handful of pulp. He even dipped the
mortar half full of water and sloshed it round and round, pouring it
afterward into the pan to rinse out what gold may have stuck to the
iron. His finger tips stirred the wet mass caressingly in the pan,
muddying the water with the waste matter and pouring that out before
he squatted on his heels at the edge of the stream.
The result was gratifying in the extreme. Granting that the values
were inclined to “jump” from quartz to porphyry and back again to
the quartz, he would still lose none of the gold. He tried to be
very conservative in estimating the probable value of the vein. He
knew that, granting quartz and porphyry were in place from the
surface downward, the values should increase with depth. It would
take some digging, however, to determine that point. He was glad
that Patricia knew nothing at all about it. If there were to be
disappointment later on, he wanted to bear it alone. The joys of
success he was perfectly willing to share; but not the sickening
certitude of failure. He judged that the outcropping would run
several hundred dollars to the ton, provided his panned samples had
run a fair average of the vein.
Material for air castles aplenty, that! Gary was afraid to believe
it. He kept warning himself headily that the world would be peopled
entirely with multimillionaires if every man’s dream of wealth came
true and every man’s hopes were realized.
“Ninety-nine per cent. of all mineral prospects are failures,
Faith,” he told the spotted cat admonishingly. “We may get the
raspberry yet on this proposition. I’m just waiting to see whether
you’re a mascot or a jinx. I wish to heck you were a dog--I’d make
you get busy and help dig!”