She pulled his suit case from under the bunk, touching lock and clasps and the smooth leather caressingly with her fingers. Its substantial elegance spoke intimately to her of Gary’s unfailing good taste in choosing his personal belongings. The square-blocked initials, “G. E. M.” (Gary Elbert Marshall, at which Patricia had often laughed teasingly), brought a lump into her throat. But Patricia boasted that she was not the weepy type of female. She would not yield now to tears.
She almost believed it was accident that raised the lid. For a moment she hesitated, not liking to pry into the little intimacies of Gary’s possessions. But she saw her picture looking up from under a silk shirt still folded as it had come from the laundry, and the sight of her own pictured eyes and smiling lips gave her a reassuring sense of belonging there.
It was inevitable that she should find the “Dear Pat:” letters; unfolded, the pages stacked like a manuscript, and tucked flat on the bottom under the clothing.
Patricia caught her breath. Here, perhaps, was the key to the whole mystery. She lifted out the pages with trembling eagerness and set her lips upon the bold scribbling she knew so well. She closed the suit case hastily, pushed it out of sight beneath the bunk and hurried out of the cabin, clasping the letters passionately to her breast. She wanted to be alone, to read them slowly, gloatingly, where no human eye could look upon her face.
She went down to the creek, crossed it and climbed a short distance up the bluff, to where a huge bowlder shaded a smaller one beside it. There, with the butte staring down inscrutably upon her, she began to read.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“IT’S THE VOICE! IT AIN’T HUMAN!”
Gary had been imprisoned in the crosscut eight days, counting the time until noon. He had stretched his lunch to the third day; human endurance could not compass a longer abstinence than that, so long as the smallest crumb remained. He had drunk perhaps a quart of water from the canteen he had carried up the bluff the day before the catastrophe, and had left the canteen there, expecting to use it for drilling. With a fresh canteen filled that morning at the creek, he had something over three gallons to begin with. Wherefore the tortures of thirst had not yet assailed him, though he had from the first hour held himself rigidly to the smallest ration he thought he could endure and keep his reason.
Through all the dragging hours, fighting indomitably against despair when hope seemed but a form of madness, he had never once yielded to temptation and taken more during any one day than he had fixed as the amount that must suffice.
He had almost resigned himself to death. And then Faith, unwittingly playing providence, had roused a fighting demon within him. The wild dove had won back a little of his failing strength just when a matter of hours would have pushed him over the edge into lassitude, that lethargy which is nature’s anesthetic when the end approaches, and the final coma which eases a soul across the border.
While Patricia slept exhaustedly in the cabin below, Gary babbled of many things in the crosscut. He awoke, believing he had dreamed that an automobile drove into the cañon the evening before. Nevertheless he decided that, since there was no hope of cutting away the granite wall with his knife, or of lifting the bowlder, Atlas-like, on his shoulders and heaving it out of the incline shaft, he might as well use what strength and breath he had in shouting.