“It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,” Gary observed tritely. “I might get a kick out of this, if Pat hadn’t been so darned fresh about the movies, and so gol-darned stubborn about me camping here and doing the long-haired hick act for the rest of my life.”
He went away then to hunt for the chicken feed; found it in another dugout cellar, and fed the chickens that came running hysterically out of the bushes when Gary rattled the pan and called them as he had seen gingham-gowned ingénues do in rural scenes.
“Golly grandma! If I could catch a young duck now, and cuddle it up under my dimpled chin, I’d make a swell Mary Pickford close-up,” he chuckled to himself. “Down on the farm, by gum! ‘Left the town to have some fun, and I’m a goin’ to have some, yes, by gum!’ Pat Connolly’s going to do some plain and fancy knuckling under, to pay for this stunt. Gosh, and there’s the cat!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE VOICE
Gary got up from his chair three separate times to remove the lamp chimney (using a white cambric handkerchief to protect his manicured fingers from blisters). In the beginning, the flame had flourished two sharp points that smoked the chimney. After the third clipping it had three, and one of them was like a signal smoke in miniature.
Gary eyed it disgustedly while he filled his pipe. Smoking a pipe while he dreamed in the fire glow had made so popular a close-up of Gary Marshall that he had used the pose in his professional photographs and had, to date, autographed and mailed sixty-seven of the firelight profiles to sixty-seven eager fans. Nevertheless, he forgot that he had a profile now.
“Hunh! Pat ought to get a real kick out of this scene,” he snorted. “Interior cabin—sitting alone—lifts head, listens. Sub-title: THE MOURNFUL HOWL OF THE COYOTE COMES TO HIM MINGLED WITH THE SOUND OF HORSES CHAMPING HAY. Only there ain’t no horses, and if there were they wouldn’t champ. Only steeds do that—in hifalutin’, gol-darned poetry. Pat ought to take a whirl at this Johnnywater stuff, herself. About twenty-four hours of it. It might make a different girl of her. Give her some sense, maybe.”
Slowly his pessimistic glance went around the meager rectangle of the cabin. Think of a man holding up here for two years! “No wonder he went out of here a nut,” was Gary’s brief summary. “And it’s my opinion the man’s judgment had begun to skid when he bought the place. Good Lord! Why, he’d probably seen it before he paid down the money! He was a tough bird, if you ask me, to hang on for two years.”
Gary’s pipe, on its way to his lips that had just blown out a small, billowy cloud of smoke, stopped halfway and was held there motionless. His whole face stilled as his mind concentrated upon a sound.
“That’s no coyote,” he muttered, and listened again.