The voice at Johnnywater

by B. M. Bower

Since Gary was not a young man of pronounced literary leanings, he failed to chronicle all of the moods and the trivial incidents which borrowed importance from the paucity of larger events. He finished hoeing the potatoes and spent a mildly interested half-day in running the water down the long rows, as Waddell’s primitive system of irrigation permitted.

That evening there was no voice shouting from the hillside, and Gary spent a somberly ruminative hour in cleaning the mud off his shoes. He was worried about his clothes, which were looking the worse for his activities; until it occurred to him that he had passed and repassed a very efficient-looking store devoted to men’s clothing alone. It comforted him considerably to reflect that he could buy whatever he needed in Las Vegas.

On the eleventh day he started down the cañon on the chance that he might see Monty coming across the desert. The tall piñon trees shut out the view of the open country beyond until he came almost abreast of the last pool of the creek where the cattle watered. He was worrying a good deal now over Monty Girard. He could not believe that he had been deliberately left afoot there in the cañon, as effectively imprisoned as if four stone walls shut him in, held within the limit of his own endurance in walking. Should he push that endurance beyond the limit, he would die very miserably.

Gary was not particularly alarmed over that phase of his desertion, however. He knew that he was not going to be foolish enough to start out afoot in the hope of getting somewhere. Only panic would drive a man to that extreme, and Gary was not of the panicky type. He had food enough to last for a long time. The air, as he told himself sardonically, was good enough for any health resort. He didn’t feel as if he could get sick there if he tried. His physical well-being, therefore, was not threatened; but he owned himself willing to tell a heartless world that he was most ungodly lonesome.

He was walking down the rough trail with his hands in his pockets, whistling a doleful ditty, the spotted cat at his heels like a dog. He was trying to persuade himself that this was about the time of day when Monty would be most likely to show up, when Faith ran before him, stopped abruptly, arched her back and ruffled her tail at something by the water hole.

Gary stopped also and stared suspiciously at two men who were filling canteens at the water hole. What roused Gary’s suspicion was the manner of the two men. While they sunk their canteens beneath the surface of the water and held them so, they kept looking up the cañon and at the bluff across the creek; sending furtive, frightened glances into the piñon grove.

“Hello!” shouted Gary, going toward them. The cañon wall echoed the shout. The two dropped their canteens and fled incontinently out toward the open. Gary walked over to the pool, caught the two canteen straps, filled the canteens and went after the men, considerably puzzled. He came upon them at their camp, beside a ten-foot ledge outcropping, a hundred yards or so below the pool. They were standing by their horses, evidently debating the question of moving on.

“Here’s your canteens,” Gary announced as he walked up to them. “What’s the big idea—running off like that?”

“Hello,” one responded guardedly. “We don’t see who hollers. That’s bad place. Don’t like ’m.”

They were Indians, though by their look they might almost be Mexicans. They were dressed much as Monty Girard had been clothed, in blue overalls and denim jacket, with old gray Stetson hats and coarse, sand-rusted shoes.