Monty Girard turned his head and stared at the cat over his shoulder. Three deep creases formed between Gary’s eyebrows while he also watched the pantomime. The cat turned, looked up ingratiatingly (still, perhaps, clinging to a memory) and trotted away toward the creek exactly as if she were following some one. Monty got up and the eyes of the two men met unsmilingly.
“Oh, heck,” said Gary, shrugging his shoulders. “Come on and see the hay I’ve put up!”
They walked in a constrained silence to the alfalfa field. Monty cast a critical eye over the raggedy edge of the cutting. He grinned slowly, tilting his head sidewise.
“Whereabouts did yuh-all learn to swing a scythe?” he asked banteringly. “I reckon yuh could do it a heap better on a hawse.”
“But the darned horse idea blew up on me. Did the balloon stunt. You get me, don’t you?” Gary’s laugh hinted at overstrained nerves. “I wish you’d been here then, Monty. Why, I didn’t dig any grave. I had to excavate a cellar to plant him in.” He waved a hand toward the haycocks. “How do you like the decorations? You will observe that they are somewhat larger than were being worn by meadows last year. These are the new 1921 models, specially designed with the stream-line effect, with a view to shedding rain. Also hail, snow and any other form of moisture. They are particularly good where horses are unavailable for hauling hay to a stack.”
“I’ll run in the horses to-morrow,” Monty volunteered casually. “The two of us together ought to get that hay hauled in a day, all right. Spuds is lookin’ good. I reckon this ain’t your first attempt at farming.”
“The first and the last—I’ll tell a waiting world. Say, I forgot you might be hungry. If this new hay won’t give your horse acute gastritis, why not tie him down by the cabin and carry him a forkful or two? I can’t feature this corral stuck off here by itself where we can’t keep an eye on it. Still, if you say it’s all right, we’ll put him in.”
Monty said it was all right, and Gary did not argue. His spirits had reacted to the stimulus of Monty’s presence, and he was conscious now and then of a heady feeling, as if he had been drinking champagne. His laughter was a bit too frequent, a shade too loud to be perfectly normal. The mental pendulum, having been tilted too far in one direction, was swinging quite as far the other way in an effort to adjust itself to normalcy.
Monty Girard was not of an analytical temperament, though circumstance had forced him to observe keenly as a matter of self-protection. He apprehended Gary’s mood sufficiently to let him set the tempo of their talk. Gary, he remembered, had been two weeks alone in Johnnywater Cañon. By his own account he was wholly unaccustomed to isolation of any degree. Monty, therefore, accepted Gary’s talkative mood as a perfectly natural desire to make up for lost time.
But there was a reserve in Gary’s talk, nevertheless, an invisible boundary which he would not pass and which held Monty Girard within certain well-defined conversational limits. It seemed to pass directly through Gary’s life at Johnnywater, and to shut off completely the things which Monty wanted most to know. Of all the trivial, surface incidents of those two weeks, Gary talked profusely. His amusing efforts to corral the pigs and keep them there; his corraling of the horses on the old Piute’s hard-gaited pony; his rural activities with hoe and irrigating shovel; all these things he described in great detail. But of his mental life in the cañon he would not speak.