“GARY MARSHALL MYSTERIOUSLY MISSING”
By riding as late as he dared that night, and letting the horses
rest until daylight the next morning, and then pushing them forward
at top desert speed--which was a steady trail trot--Monty reached the
first ranch house a little after noon the next day. In all that time
he had not seen a human being, though he had hoped to be overtaken
or to meet some car on the road.
Nerve-racking delay met him at the ranch. The woman and two small
children were there, but the man (Ben Thompson was his name) had
left that morning for Las Vegas in the car. Monty was too late by
about four hours.
He ate dinner there, fed his horses hay and grain, watered them the
last minute and started out again, still hoping that some car would
be traveling that way. But luck was against him and he was forced to
camp that night thirty miles out from Las Vegas.
Long before daylight he was up and on his way again, to take
advantage of the few hours before the intense heat of the day began.
Jazz was going lame, traveling barefooted at the forced pace Monty
required of him. It was nearly five o’clock when he limped into town
with the dusty pack roped upon his sweat-encrusted back.
Monty went directly to the depot and climbed the steep stairs to the
telegraph office, his spur rowels burring along the boards. He
leaned heavily upon the shelf outside the grated window while he
wrote two messages with a hand that shook from exhaustion.
The first was addressed to the sheriff of Nye County, notifying him
that a man had disappeared in Johnnywater Cañon and that it looked
like murder. The other read as follows:
“P. Connolly,
Cons. Grain & Milling Co.,
Los Angeles, Calif.
“Gary Marshall mysteriously missing from
Johnnywater evidence points to foul play suspect
Hawkins wire instructions.
“M. Girard.”
Monty regretted the probable shock that message would give to
Patricia, but he reasoned desperately that she would have to know
the worst anyway, and that a telegram never permits much softening
of a blow. She might know something about Hawkins that would be
helpful. At any rate, he knew of no one so intimately concerned as
Patricia.
He waited for his change, asked the operator to rush both messages
straight through, and clumped heavily down the stairs. He remounted
and made straight for the nearest stable and turned the horses over
to the proprietor himself, who he knew would give them the best care
possible. After that he went to a hotel, got a room with bath, took
a cold plunge and crawled between the hot sheets with the window as
wide open as it would go, and dropped immediately into the heavy
slumber of complete mental and physical exhaustion.
While Monty was refreshing himself with the cold bath, Gary,
squatted on his heels against the wall of his dungeon, was fingering
half of a hoarded biscuit and trying to decide whether he had better
eat it now and turn a bold face toward starvation, or put it back in
the lard bucket and let the thought of it torture him for a few more
hours.
The telegram to the sheriff at Tonopah arrived while the sheriff was
hunting down a murderer elsewhere. His deputy read the wire and
speared it face down upon a bill-hook already half filled with a
conglomerate mass of other communications. The deputy was not
inclined to attach much significance to the message. He frequently
remarked that if the sheriff’s office got all fussed up over every
yarn that came in, the county would be broke inside a month paying
mileage and salary to a dozen deputies. Monty had not said that a
man had been murdered. He merely suspected something of the sort.
The deputy slid down deeper into the armchair he liked best, cocked
his feet higher on the desk and filled his pipe. Johnnywater Cañon
and the possible fate of the man who had disappeared from there
entered not at all into his somnolent meditations.
The telegram to Patricia reached the main office in Los Angeles
after five o’clock. The clerk who telephones the messages called up
the office of the Consolidated Grain & Milling Company and got no
reply after repeated ringing. Patricia’s telegram was therefore held
until office hours the next morning. A messenger boy delivered it
last, on his first trip out that way with half-a-dozen messages. The
new stenographer was not at first inclined to take it, thinking
there must be some mistake. The new manager was in conference with
an important customer and she was afraid to disturb him with a
matter so unimportant. And since she had quarreled furiously with
the bookkeeper just the day before, she would not have spoken to him
for anything on earth. So Patricia’s telegram lay on the desk until
nearly noon.
At last the manager happened to stroll into the outer office and
picked up the yellow envelope which had not been opened. Being half
in love with Patricia--in spite of a wife--he knew at once who “P.
Connolly” was. He was a conscientious man though his affections did
now and then stray from his own hearthside. He immediately called a
messenger and sent the telegram back to the main office with
forwarding instructions.
At that time, Gary was standing before the sunny slit at the end of
the crosscut, pounding doggedly with the single-jack at the corner
of the rock wall. He had given up attempting to use the dulled drill
as a gadget. He could no longer strike with sufficient force to make
the steel bite into the rock, nor could he land the blow accurately
on the head of the drill.
The day before he had managed to crack off a piece of rock twice the
width of his hand; and though it had broken too far inside the
crosscut to accomplish much in the way of enlarging the opening,
Gary was nevertheless vastly encouraged. He could now thrust out his
hand to the elbow. He could feel the sun shine hot upon it at
midday. He could feel the warm wind in his face when he held it
pressed close against the open space. He could even smooth Faith’s
sleek head when she scrambled upon the bowlder and peered in at him
round-eyed and anxious. The world that day had seemed very close.
But to-day, while the telegram to Patricia was loitering in Los
Angeles, the sky over Johnnywater was filled thick with clouds.
Daylight came gray into the deep gloom of the crosscut. And Gary
could not swing a steady blow, but pounded doggedly at the rock with
quick, short-arm strokes like a woodpecker hammering at the bole of
a dead tree.
He was obliged to stop often and rest, leaning against the wall with
his hunger-sharpened profile like a cameo where the light shone in
upon him. He would stand there and pant for a while and then lift
the four-pound hammer--grown terribly heavy, lately--and go on
pounding unavailingly at the rock.