Steeped in that desert magic which makes beautiful all distances, the big land shamed him somehow and sent him back into the cañon 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 cañon.
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 Cañon. The man he was mentally visualizing seemed to be of the type of miner who goes prospecting through the desert. And Johnnywater Cañon certainly held mineral possibilities, if one were to judge by the rock formation and the general look of the cañon walls.