He turned and went in, his footsteps clumping down the empty, echoing corridor to the office of the County Recorder. A wholesome-looking girl with hair almost the color of Patricia’s rose from before a typewriter and came forward to the counter. Her eyes widened a bit when she looked at Gary, and the color deepened a little in her cheeks. Perhaps she had seen Gary’s face on the screen and remembered it pleasantly; certainly a man like Gary Marshall walks but seldom into the Recorder’s office of any desert county seat. Gary told her very briefly what he wanted, and the County Recorder herself came forward to serve him.
Very obligingly she looked up all the records pertaining to Johnnywater. Gary himself went in with her to lift the heavy record books down from their places in the vault behind the office. The County Recorder was thorough as well as obliging. Gary lifted approximately a quarter of a ton of books, and came out of the vault wiping perspiration from inside his collar and smoothing his plumage generally after the exercise. It was a warm day in Tonopah.
Gary had not a doubt left to pin his hopes upon. The County Recorder had looked up water rights to Johnnywater and adjacent springs, and had made sure that Waddell had made no previous transfers to other parties, a piece of treachery which Gary had vaguely hoped to uncover. Patricia’s title appeared to be dishearteningly unassailable. Gary would have been willing to spend his last dollar in prosecuting Waddell for fraud; but apparently no such villainy had brought Waddell within his clutches.
From the County Recorder, who had a warm, motherly personality and was chronically homesick for Pasadena and eager to help any one who knew the place as intimately as did Gary, he learned how great a stranger Tonopah is to her county corners. Pat was right, he discovered. Miles and miles of country lay all unsurveyed; a vast area to be approached in the spirit of the pioneer who sets out to explore a land unknown.
Roughly scaling the district on the county map which the Recorder borrowed from the Clerk (and which Gary promptly bought when he found that it was for sale) he decided that the water holes in the Johnnywater district were approximately twenty to forty miles apart.
“Pat’s cows will have to pack canteens where village bossies wear bells on their lavallieres,” Gary grinned to the County Recorder. “Calves are probably taboo in the best bovine circles of Nevada—unless they learn to ride to water on their mammas’ backs, like baby toads.”
The Recorder smiled at him somewhat wistfully. “You remind me of my son in Pasadena,” she said. “He always joked over the drawbacks. I wish you were going to be within riding distance of here; I’ve an extra room that I’d love to have you use sometimes. But—” she sighed, “—you’ll probably never make the trip over here unless you come the roundabout way on the train, to record something. And the mail is much more convenient, of course. What few prospectors record mining claims in that district nearly always send them by mail, I’ve noticed. In all the time I’ve been in office, this Mr. Waddell is the only man from that part of the county who came here personally. He said he had other business here, I remember, and intended going on East.”
“So Waddell went East, did he?” Gary looked up from the map. “He’s already gone, I suppose.”
“I suppose so. I remember he said he was going to England to visit his old home. His health was bad, I imagine; I noticed he looked thin and worried, and his manner was very nervous.”
“It ought to be,” Gary mumbled over the map. “Isn’t there any road at all, tapping that country from here?”