“Here’s where Handsome Gary raises a crop of callouses big as birds’
eggs in his mad pursuit of the fickle jade, Fortune. Come on, Faith,
doggone you; I want you handy in case this gold thing is a fluke.”
Gary had remembered that eating is considered necessary to the
preservation of life and had delayed his further investigation of
the outcropping until he had scrambled together some sort of a meal.
He had bolted food as if he must hurry to catch a train that was
already whistling a warning. Now he took down a canteen from behind
the door, shouldered an old pick and shovel he had found in the
shed, and started back up the bluff, stopping just long enough to
fill the canteen at the creek as he passed.
Loaded with canteen and tools, the climb was a heart-breaking one.
The spotted cat led the way, going as straight as possible toward
the tiny ridge behind which lay the outcropping. At the top, Gary
decided that hereafter he would bring a lunch and spend the day up
there, thus saving a valuable hour or two and a good deal of energy.
Energy, he realized, would be needed in unlimited quantities if he
did much development work alone.
By hard labor he managed to clear away the rubble of the slide and
uncover the vein for a distance of several feet before dusk began to
fill the cañon. He carried down with him the richest pieces of rock
that he could find, and that night he worked with mortar and pestle
until his arms ached with the unaccustomed exercise.
Several times that evening he was pulled away from his air castles
by the peculiar sensation of some one standing very close to him. It
was not the first time he had experienced the sensation, but never
before had the impression brought him a comforting sense of friendly
companionship. It struck him suddenly that he must be growing used
to the idea, and that Johnnywater Cañon was not at all likely to
“get” him as it had got Waddell. He had not heard the Voice all day,
but he believed that he could now listen to it with perfect
equanimity.
He had just one worry that evening; rather, he had one difficult
problem to solve. In order to work in that quartz, dynamite was
absolutely necessary. Unless he could find some on the place, it
began to look very much as if he would not be able to do much unless
he could get some brought out to him from town.
The result of his cogitations that evening was a belief that Steve
Carson must have had dynamite, caps and fuse on hand. Men living out
in a country known to produce minerals of one sort and another
usually were supplied with explosives. Even if they never did any
mining, they might want to blow a bowlder out of the way now and
then. He had never seen any powder about the place; but on the other
hand, he had not looked for any.
The next morning he panned the pulped rock immediately after
breakfast and was overjoyed at the amount of gold he gleaned from
the pint or so of pulp. At that rate, he told himself gleefully, the
wedding ring would not need to wait very long. After that he went
hunting dynamite in the storehouse and shed. He was lucky enough to
find a couple of dozen sticks of powder and some caps and fuse
wrapped in a gunny sack and hung from the ridgepole of the shed. The
dynamite did not look so very old, and he guessed that it had been
brought there by Waddell. This seemed to him an amazing bit of good
luck, and he shouldered the stuff and went off up the bluff with an
extra canteen and his lunch, whistling in an exuberance of good
humor with the world. Faith, of course, went with him and curled
herself in her little hollow just under the frowning malapi ledge.
Gary worked for three days, following the quartz and porphyry down
at an incline of forty-five degrees. The vein held true to form, and
the samples he panned each morning never failed to show a drag of
gold after the concentrate. 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 was sitting on the edge of what would one day be an incline
shaft--when he had dug it deep enough--inspecting his blistered hands.
After several days of quiet the wind began to blow in gusts from off
the butte. Somewhere behind Gary and above him there came a
bellowing halloo that made him jump and slide into the open cut.
Again and again came the bellow above him--and after his first
astonishment Gary’s mouth relaxed into a slow grin.
“I’ll bet right there’s the makings of that spook Voice!” he said
aloud. “Up there in the rim rock somewhere.”
He climbed out of the cut and stood facing the cliff, listening. At
close quarters the call became a bellow with only a faint
resemblance to a Voice shouting hello. He remembered now that on
that first morning when he had searched for the elusive “man” on the
bluff, the wind had died before he had climbed very high. After that
he had not heard the Voice again that day.
He made his way laboriously up to the rim rock, listening always to
locate the exact source of the sound. The bluff was almost
perpendicular just under the rim, and huge bowlders lay where they
had fallen in some forgotten time from the top. Gary scrambled over
the first of these and confronted a narrow aperture which seemed to
lead back into the cliff. The opening was perhaps three feet wide at
the bottom, drawing in to a pointed roof a few feet above his head.
The Voice did not seem to come from this opening, but Gary’s
curiosity was roused. He went into the cave. Fifteen feet, as he
paced the distance, brought him to the rear wall--and to a small
recess where a couple of boxes sat side by side with a three-pound
coffee can on top and a bundle wrapped in canvas. Gary forgot the
Voice for the time being and began to investigate the cache.
It was perfectly simple; perfectly amazing also. The boxes had been
opened, probably in order to carry the contents more easily up the
bluff; the most ambitious man would scarcely want to make that climb
with a fifty-pound box of dynamite on his shoulder. But both boxes
were full, or so nearly full that the few missing sticks did not
matter. The coffee can contained six boxes of caps, and in the
canvas bundle were eight full coils of fuse.
“Golly grandma, if this ain’t movie luck!” Gary jubilated to the
cat, which had tagged him into the cave. “Or it would be if the
dynamite were fresh. From the weird tales I’ve heard about men who
got fresh with stale dynamite and landed in fragments before a
horrified audience, Handsome Gary’s liable to lose his profile if he
doesn’t watch his step. But it’s giant powder, and if it will shoot
at all, I’ve simply got to use it. It’s just about as necessary a
prop in this scene as a rope is in a lynching bee. Well, now we’ll
go ketchum that Voice.”
By dint of hard climbing he made his way higher, to where the ledge
seemed broken in splintered clefts above the slide. As he went, the
Voice bellowed at him with a rising tone which distance might easily
modify to a human cry. Even so close, he was some time in
discovering just how the sound was made. But at last, after much
listening and investigating the splintered slits, he caught the rush
of wind up through a series of small, chimneylike openings. Here,
then, was the Voice that had given Johnnywater Cañon so weird a
reputation.
As to the appearance of the Voice just after Steve Carson’s
disappearance, Gary considered that an exaggeration, unconscious,
perhaps, but nevertheless born of superstitious fear. Steve Carson
might have told a different story could he have been questioned
about the sound.
“I’d say that Injun was about due to check out, anyway,” he told
Faith, who was nosing a crack that probably held a rat or two. “Now
I see how it’s done, the Voice isn’t half so mysterious or spookish
as all that giant powder right on hand where I need it. Don’t even
have to pack it up the bluff. And that’s Providence, I’ll tell the
cock-eyed world! When I think how I chased that supernatural Voice
all over the bluff and then sat and shivered in the cabin because I
couldn’t find it--Faith, I should think you might have told me! You
can’t kid _me_ into believing you weren’t wise all the while. You
know a heap more than you let on. You can’t string _me_.”
He made his way back to the cave and examined more carefully the
giant powder cached there. He cut a foot length of fuse, lighted and
timed it with his watch. The fuse burned with almost perfect
accuracy--a minute to the foot. Then he capped a two-foot length,
broke a stick of powder in two, carefully inserted the cap in the
dynamite and went out and laid it under a bowlder the size of a
half-barrel. He scraped loose dirt over it, split the fuse end back
an inch, “spitted” it with his cigarette and ducked into the cave
with his watch in his hand to await the result.
The explosion lifted the bowlder, and broke it in three pieces, and
Gary felt that the experiment had been a success. The powder would
probably miss fire occasionally, since it was crystallized with age.
It might also explode when he least expected it to do so, but Gary
was prepared to take that risk; though many an old miner would have
refused profanely to touch the stuff.
“Well, I used to take a chance on breaking my neck every time I put
over a stunt before the camera,” he mused. “That was just to hold
down a job. I ought to be dead willing to take a chance with this
junk when it means millions for my girl--maybe.”
With explosives enough to last him a couple of months at the very
least, Gary felt that Fate was giving him a broad smile of
encouragement. He acknowledged to himself, while he mortared rich
pieces of porphyry and quartz that night, the growing belief that he
had been all wrong in blaming Patricia for making the investment. It
was, he was beginning to think, the whispering of Destiny that had
urged Patricia to buy Johnnywater in the first place; and it was
Destiny again at work that had pushed him out of pictures and over
here to work out the plan.
Perhaps he did not reduce the thought to so definite a form, but
that was the substance of his speculations.
So he dreamed and worked with untiring energy through the days,
dreamed and pulped gold-bearing rock for the wedding ring during the
evenings when he should have been resting, and slept like a tired
baby at night. Whenever he heard the Voice shouting from the bluff,
he shrugged his shoulders and grinned at the joke the wind was
trying to play. Whenever he felt that unseen presence beside him, if
he did not grin he at least accepted it with a certain sense of
friendly companionship. And the spotted cat, Faith, was always
close, like a pet dog.