It must have been snappy indeed, for within five minutes James Blaine Hawkins was driving down the trail toward the mouth of the cañon, quite as fast as he had driven the night before. Only this time he went in broad daylight and he had no intention of ever coming back.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
GARY RIDES TO KAWICH
Gary saddled Jazz, filled the two canteens at the creek, tied some food for himself and rolled barley for Jazz in a flour sack—with a knot tied between to prevent mixing—and rode down the trail before the dust had fully settled after the passing of James Blaine Hawkins.
Primarily he wanted to make sure that Hawkins was actually leaving for town. After that he meant to ride over to Kawich, if he could find the place. In the mental slump that followed close on the heels of his altercation, Gary felt an overwhelming hunger for speech with a friend. Monty Girard was practical, wholesome and loyal as a man may be. Not for a long while had Gary known a man of Monty Girard’s exact type. He confessed frankly to himself that certain phases of the James Blaine Hawkins incident had shaken his nerves. He was not at all sure that he meant to tell Monty about that side of the encounter, but he felt that he needed the mental tonic of Monty Girard’s simple outlook on life. There was nothing subtle, no complexities in Monty’s nature.
He dismounted and fastened the gate carefully behind him with a secret twist of the wire that would betray the fact if another opened the gate in his absence. As an added precaution he brushed out the trail of his own passing, as far as he could reach inside the gate with a pine branch. It was not likely that any one would visit Johnnywater Cañon; but Gary felt an unexplained desire to know it if they did. There was not one chance in a hundred that any one passing through the gate would observe the untracked space just within. An Indian might. But Gary had no fear that any Indian would invade Johnnywater Cañon. For that matter, it was not fear at all that impelled the caution. He simply wanted to know if any one visited the place.
Far down the mesa a cloud of gray dust rolled swiftly along a brown pencil-marking through the sage. That would be James Blaine Hawkins heading for Las Vegas as fast as gas and four cylinders would take him. Gary pulled up and watched the dust cloud, his eyes laughing.
“God bless that pinto cat!” he murmured, and leaned to smooth the sorrel’s mane which the wind was tossing and tangling. “We won’t see him again—for a while, anyway. But golly grandma, won’t Pat be sore at the way I jimmed her revenge on Handsome Gary! But you know, Jazz, I expect to have to live with Pat, and I don’t expect to do all my walking on my knees, either. A little demonstration of manly authority now and then does ’em good. They won’t own it, Jazz, but they all like to feel they’ve tamed a cave man, and goodness knows when he may get rough. I worked in ‘The Taming of the Shrew,’ and I learned a lot about women from that.”
The dust cloud rolled out of sight around a lonesome black butte, and Gary waved it a mocking farewell and got out the map which Monty had made of the trail to Kawich.
“Five miles down the trail toward town, and then turn short off to the left,” he mumbled, studying the crude map. “That’s simple enough—and no wonder I couldn’t trail Monty afoot. I didn’t walk to where he turned off. But hold on here! Dotted line shows faint stock trail straight across country to the Kawich road. Monty did say something about a cut-off, Jazz. All right, we’ll hunt around here in the sage till we find that dotted line. This is great stuff. Feel so good now I don’t have to go see Monty to get cheered up. But we’ll go just the same—and see the country.”
The trail, when he found it, was so faint that it was scarcely distinguishable in the gravelly soil. In places where they followed a rocky ridge Gary would have missed it altogether; but once on the trail Jazz followed it by instinct and his familiarity with the country. Probably he had traveled that way before, carrying Waddell, or perhaps Steve Carson, since Jazz was well past his youth.