Read Ebook: The voice at Johnnywater by Bower B M Schuyler Remington Illustrator

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Ebook has 739 lines and 52568 words, and 15 pages

her own. He was willing to swear that he had covered every foot of that hillside, and probably he had, very nearly. And he had found no trace of any man, living or dead.

He slid off the bowlder and went picking his way down the steep bluff to the cabin. A humane impulse had sent him out as soon as he opened his eyes that morning. He was half-starved and more nearly exhausted than he had ever been after a hard day's work doing "stunts" for the movies.

Now and then he looked up the ca?on to where Pat's alfalfa field lay, a sumptuous patch of deep green, like an emerald set deep in some dull metal. Nearer the cabin were the rows of potato plants which Monty had mentioned. There was a corral, too, just beyond a clump of trees behind the cabin. And from the head of the ca?on to the mouth he could glimpse here and there the twisted thread of Johnnywater Creek.

"Drunk, maybe," Gary finally dismissed the subject from his mind. "He sure as heck couldn't be hurt so bad, if he was able to get out of the ca?on in the dark. It'll be something to tell about when I get back. I'll ask Monty what he thinks about it, to-morrow."

But he didn't ask Monty. He rather expected that Monty would be along rather early in the forenoon, and he was ready by nine o'clock. He had filled the feed box for the chickens, had given the cat a farewell talk, and locked his pyjamas into his suit case. The rest of the day he spent in waiting.

But when the third day and the fourth and the fifth had gone, Gary began to register impatience and concern. He walked down the ca?on and out upon the trail as far as was practical, half hoping that he might see some chance traveler. But the whole world seemed to be empty and waiting, with a still patience that placed no limit upon its quiescent expectancy.

Steeped in that desert magic which makes beautiful all distances, the big land shamed him somehow and sent him back into the ca?on in a better frame of mind. Any trivial thing could have delayed Monty Girard. It was slightly comforting to know that the big world out there was smiling under the sky.

He was sitting at supper just after sundown that evening when a strange thing happened. The spotted cat--Gary by this time was calling her Faith because of her trustful disposition--was squatted on all fours beside the table, industriously lapping a saucer of condensed milk. For the want of more human companionship, Gary was joking with the cat, which responded now and then with a slight wave of her tail.

"You're the only thing I like about the whole darn outfit," Gary was saying. "I don't remember your being mentioned in the deed, so I think I'll just swipe you when I go. As a souvenir. Only I don't know what the heck I'll do with you--give you to Pat, I reckon."

Faith looked up with an amiable mew, but she did not look at Gary. Had a person been standing near the foot of the bunk six feet or so away, she would have been looking up into his face. She went back to lapping her milk, but Gary eyed her curiously. There was something odd about that look and that friendly little remark of hers, but for the life of him he could not explain just what was wrong.

Once again, while Gary watched her, the cat looked up at that invisible point the height of a man from the floor. She finished her milk, licked her lips satisfiedly and got up. She glanced at Gary, glanced again toward the bunk, arched her back, walked deliberately over and curved her body against nothing at all, purring her contented best.

Gary watched her with a contraction of the scalp on the back of his head. Faith stood there for a moment rubbing her side against empty air, looked up inquiringly, came over and jumped upon Gary's knee. There she tucked her feet under her, folded her tail close to her curiously mottled fur and settled herself for a good, purry little nap. Now and then she opened her eyes to look toward the bunk, her manner indifferent.

"The cat's got 'em, too," Gary told himself--but it is significant that he did not speak the words aloud as he had been doing those five days, just to combat the awful stillness of the ca?on.

He stared intently toward the place where the cat had stood arching her body and purring. There was nothing there, so far as Gary could see. But slowly, as he stared toward the place, a mental picture formed in his mind.

He pictured to himself a man whom he had never seen; a tall, lean man with shoulders slightly stooped and a face seamed by rough weather and hard living more than with the years he had lived. The man was, Gary guessed, in his late forties. His eyes were a keen blue, his mouth thin-lipped and firm. Gary felt that if he removed the stained gray hat he wore, he would reveal a small bald spot on the crown of his head. Over one eye was a jagged scar. Another puckered the skin on his left cheek bone. He was dressed in gray flannel shirt and khaki overalls tucked into high, laced boots.

Gary visualized him as being the man who had built this cabin. He thought that he was picturing Waddell, and it occurred to him that Waddell might have been mining a little in Johnnywater Ca?on. The man he was mentally visualizing seemed to be of the type of miner who goes prospecting through the desert. And Johnnywater Ca?on certainly held mineral possibilities, if one were to judge by the rock formation and the general look of the ca?on walls.

Gary himself had once known something about minerals, his dad having sent him to take a course in mineralogy at Denver with a view to making of his son a respectable mining engineer. Gary had spent two years in the school and almost two years doing field work for practice, and had shown a certain aptitude for the profession. But Mills, the motion-picture director, had taken a company into Arizona where Gary was making a report on the minerals of a certain district, and Gary had been weaned away from mines. Now, he was so saturated in studio ideals and atmosphere that he had almost forgotten he had ever owned another ambition than to become a star with a company of his own.

Well, this man then--the man about whom he found himself thinking so intently--must have found something here in the ca?on. He did not know why he believed it, but he began to think that Waddell had found gold; though it was not, properly speaking, a gold country. But Gary remembered to have noticed a few pieces of porphyry float on the bluff the morning that he had spent in looking for the man who shouted in the night. The float might easily be gold-bearing. Gary had not examined it, since he had been absorbed in another matter. It is only the novice who becomes excited and builds air castles over a piece of float.

Gary turned his head abruptly and looked back, exactly as he would have done had a man approached and stood at his shoulder. He was conscious of a slight feeling of surprise that the man of whom he was thinking did not stand there beside him.

"I'll be getting 'em too, if I don't look out," he snorted, and dumped the mottled cat unceremoniously on the floor.

It has been said by many that thoughts are things. Certainly Gary's thoughts that evening seemed live things. While he was washing the dishes and sweeping the cabin floor, he more than once glanced up, expecting to see the man who looked like a miner. The picture he had conjured seemed a living personality, unseen, unheard, but nevertheless present there in the cabin.

Gary was an essentially practical young man, not much given to fanciful imaginings. He did not believe in anything to which one may permissibly attach the word psychic. Imagination of a sort he had possessed since he was a youngster, and stories he could weave with more or less originality. He did not, therefore, run amuck in a maze of futile conjecturing. He believed in hunches, and there his belief stopped short, satisfied to omit explanations.

That night fell pitch black, with inky clouds pushing out over the rim rock and a wind from the west that bellowed across the ca?on and whipped the branches of the pines near the cabin. Above the clouds played the lightning, the glare of it seeping through between the folds and darting across small open spaces.

Gary sat in the doorway watching the clouds with the lightning darting through. True to his type and later training, he was thinking what a wonderful storm scene it would make in a picture. And then, without warning, he heard a voice shouting a loud halloo from the bluff. Again it called, and ended with a wail of pain.

Gary started. He turned his face to the ca?on side and listened, deep lines between his eyebrows. It was almost a week since he had heard the call, and it did not seem natural that the man should be shouting again from the same point on the bluff. He had been so sure that the fellow, whoever he was, had left the ca?on that first night. It was absolutely illogical that he should return without coming near the cabin.

Gary got up and stood irresolute in the doorway. The voice was insistent, calling again and again a summons difficult to resist.

Gary cupped his hands around his mouth to reply, then hesitated and dropped them to his side. He turned to go in for the lantern and abandoned that idea also. On that first night he had answered repeatedly the call and had searched gropingly amongst the bowlders and ledges. His trouble had gone for nothing, and Gary could think of but one reason why he had failed to find the man: he believed the man had not wanted to be found, although there was no sense in that either. The stubborn streak in Gary dominated his actions now. He meant to find the fellow and have it out with him. He remembered Monty's remark about Waddell imagining he heard things, and selling out in a hurry, his nerves gone to pieces. Probably the man up on the bluff could explain why Waddell left Johnnywater!

Gary crossed the creek during spurts of lightning, and made his way cautiously up the bluff. After spending a long forenoon there he knew his way fairly well and could negotiate ledges that had stopped him that first night. He went carefully, making himself as inconspicuous as possible. The voice kept shouting, with now and then a high note that almost amounted to a shriek.

The storm broke, and Gary was drenched to the skin within five minutes. Flashes of lightning blinded him. He stumbled back down the bluff and reached the cabin, the storm beating upon him furiously. As he closed the door, the voice on the bluff shrieked at him, and Gary thought there was a mocking note in the call.

GARY WRITES A LETTER

"Johnnywater Ca?on.

"Dear Pat:

"I take it all back. There's a new model of cow called Walking X, that don't need grass. It has a special food-saving device somewhere in its anatomy, which enables it to subsist on mountain scenery, sagebrush and hopes. I haven't discovered yet whether the late model of Walking X chews a cud or merely rolls a rock under its tongue to prevent thirst. I'm guessing it's the rock. There's darned little material for cuds in the country. If I were going to stay here and make you a cattle queen, I should ask you to get prices on gum in carload lots.

"Yesterday I was hiking out on the desert--for exercise, my dear girl. Can't afford to grow flabby muscled as well as flabby souled. Souls don't register on the screen anyway--but it takes muscle to throw the big heavy around in the blood-curdling scrap which occurs usually in the fourth reel. Besides, I'm going to throw a fellow down the bluff--when I get him located. Don't know how big he is, as I haven't met the gentleman yet. It's a cinch he hasn't got lung trouble though; he's the longest-winded cuss I ever heard holler.

"He's been trying to get fresh with me ever since I came. Picks wild, stormy nights when a man wants to stay indoors and then gets up on the bluff and hollers for help. First couple of nights I heard him, I bit. But I don't fall for that hokum any more. A man that can holler the way he does and come back strong the next night don't need any assistance from me.

"I hoed your spuds to-day, Pat. Did a perfect imitation of Charlie Ray--except that I wasn't costumed for the part. Didn't have no gallus to hitch up and thereby register disgust with my job. But I featured the sweat--a close-up of me would have looked like Gary out in a rain. It was accidental. I was chasing Pat Connolly's pigs, trying to round them up and get acquainted. They headed for Pat Connolly's alfalfa and they went through the potato patch. There ought to be a fence around those spuds, Pat; or else the pigs ought to be shut up. You're a darn shiftless ranch lady to let pigs run loose to root up your spuds. They're in full blossom--and don't ask me which I mean, pigs or potatoes. They needed a little strong-arm work, bad. The pigs ducked out of the scene into the alfalfa--and that sure needs cutting, too. There's a scythe in the shed, and a fork or two and a hay rake. If Waddell's got horses he couldn't have used them much. Maybe he couldn't afford a mowing machine, and cut his hay with a scythe. There's a wagon here, and a comedy hayrack. But I can't feature handsome Gary scything hay.

"Anyway, every darned spud blossom in the patch peeked up at me through a jungle of weeds. That wouldn't look good to a buyer . They're not finished yet, but I can do the rest in the morning if Monty don't come.

"Monty Girard has plumb forgotten me, I guess. He was a friendly cuss, too. He's seven days overdue, and I'd get out and hunt him up, only he forgot to leave me his address and I can't get his 'phone number from Information. Can't get Information. There ain't no telephone. He said his camp was about twenty miles off. But I'm wise to these desert miles. More likely it's thirty. I tried to trail him yesterday, but he took our back track for five miles or so, and for all I know he may have beat it back to town. That's not walking distance, I'll tell a heartless world.

"I'm stuck here until somebody comes and hauls me away. The last house I saw was back down the road a nice little jaunt of about sixty-five miles. Monty Girard drives his Ford like he was working in one of those comedy chases. And it's four hours by the watch from that last shack to this shack--Monty Girard driving. Figure it yourself, Pat, and guess how many afternoon calls I've made on my neighbors. I'm afraid the pinto cat couldn't walk that far, and it would hurt her feelings if I didn't ask her to join the party.

"Said pinto cat is a psychic. Waddell was a nut of some kind, and the cat caught it. Seems Waddell got the habit of seeing things--though I haven't located any still yet--and now the cat looks up and meows at the air, and rubs her fur against her imagination. Got my goat the first time she did it--I admit it. I can't say I feature it yet, her talking and playing up to some gink I can't see. But I named her Faith and I've no kick coming, I reckon, if the eyes of Faith looks up to things of which I kennest not.

"There's something wrong about this trick ca?on, anyway. I can't seem to feature it. You can't make me believe that boob up on the bluff thinks he's a cuckoo clock and just pops out and hollers because he's made that way. He's trying to get my goat and make me iris out of the scene. There's going to be a real punch in the next reel, and that guy with the big voice will be in front of it. His head is swelled now since he's scared Waddell out. But he's going to get a close-up of yours truly--and the big punch of the story.

"The other night just after dark I sneaked up the bluff as high as I could get without making a noise so he'd hear me, and laid for him. I was all set to cut loose with that blood-curdling Apache yell dad's riders used to practice when I was a kid. But he never opened his mouth all night. Made a fool out of me, all right, losing my sleep like that for nothing. Then the next night he started in at sundown and hollered half the night.

"I'm overdue at the studio now, by several days. If Mills could get that contract for me, it's gone blooey by this time. And he can't get word to me or hear from me--I'm not even famous enough yet to make good publicity out of my disappearance. Soon as Monty comes, I intend to beat it in to Las Vegas and wire Mills. Then if there's nothing doing for me in pictures right now, I'll get out and see how good I am as a salesman.

"But I hate to let that four-flusher up here in the rocks think he's got the laugh on me. And that alfalfa ought to be put up, and no mistake. The spuds need water, too. After the trusty hoe has got in its deadly work on the weeds, a good soaking would make them look like a million dollars. And I suppose the pigs ought to be shut up before they root up all the spuds on the place--but then some one would have to be here to look after them. That's the heck of it, Pat. When you get a place on your hands, you simply let yourself in for a dog's life, looking after it.

"You had a picture of me riding out at dawn after the cattle! That shows how much you don't know. All told there's about fifteen head of stock that water here at the mouth of the creek. I mean, at the end of the creek where it flows into a big hole and forgets to flow out again. It acts kind of tired, anyway, getting that far; no pep to go farther. As for horses, Monty and I looked for your horses as we came across the desert out here. There wasn't a hoof in sight, and Monty says they're probably watering over at another spring about fifteen miles from here. It's too far to walk and drag a loop, Pat. So your dashing Western hee-ro can't dash. Nothing to dash on. That's a heck of a note, ain't it?

"Did you ever try to make three meals fill up a day? Well, don't. Can't be did. I've read all the magazines--the whole two. I also have read Mr. Waddell's complete library. One is 'Cattle and Their Diseases,' and the other is 'Tom Brown's School Days,' with ten pages gone just when I was getting a kick out of it. That was one day when it rained. I knew a man once who could go to bed at sundown and sleep till noon the next day. I don't believe he kept a psychic cat, though, or chased voices all over the hills. Anyway, I forgot to find out how he did it.

"This looks a good ca?on for mineral. Something tells me some rich stuff has been taken out of here. If I were going to stay any length of time, I might look around some. I keep thinking about gold--but I guess it's just a notion. Monty Girard ought to be here to-morrow, sure. I've packed my pyjamas every morning and unpacked them every night. I've got as much faith as the pinto cat--but it don't get me a darn bit more than it gets her. Packing my pyjamas and waiting for Monty Girard is just about as satisfactory as the cat's rubbing up against nothing. You'd think she'd get fed up on that sort of thing, but she don't. Just before I started to write, she trotted toward the door looking up and purring like she does when I come in. Only nobody came in. You wouldn't notice it if there was anybody else around. Being alone makes it creepy.

"I started this because I wanted to talk to somebody. Being alone gets a fellow's goat in time. And seeing I don't intend to send this to you, Pat, I'll say I'm crazy about you. There's not another girl in the world I'd want. I love the way you stand by your own ideas, Pat, and use your own brains. If you only knew how high you stack up alongside most of the girls, you wouldn't worry about who played opposite me. I was sore when I left you that night--but that was just because I hate to see you lose your money, and that 'flabby-soul' wallop put me down for the count.

"I'll admit now that you didn't get cheated as much as I thought; but I'm here to remark also that Johnnywater Ca?on is no place for my Princess Pat to live. And it's a cinch that Handsome Gary is not going to waste his splendid youth in this hide-out. There goes that darned nut on the bluff again, yelling hello at me.

"If Monty Girard doesn't show up to-morrow I'm sure as heck going to figure out some way of getting at that bird. Yesterday he was hollering in the daytime. He's crazy, or he's trying to make a nut out of me. I believe he wants this ca?on to himself for some reason, and tries to scare everybody out. But I don't happen to scare quite as easy as Waddell. Though the joke of it is, I couldn't get out of here till Monty Girard comes, no matter how scared I got. I'm sure glad I never get sick.

"Golly grandma, how I hate that howling! I'd rather have coyotes ringed around the ca?on four deep than listen to that merry roundelay of the gink on the bluff. I'd take a shot at him if I had a gun.

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