“What’s a heavy?”
“The villain. Pat Connolly went and had another impulse. She let the place on shares to a gink that I’ll bet has done time. He had every mark of a crook, and he had the darndest holdup game you ever saw. Pat Connolly doesn’t know anything at all about ranches. She went and——”
“Pat Connolly—she?” Monty was dipping cold water into the coffeepot, and he spilled a cupful.
“Er—yes.” Gary reddened a bit. “She’s a girl all right. Finest in the world. Patricia Connolly’s her name, and if I can pull her clear on this damned Johnnywater investment and remain on speaking terms with Pat, I expect she’ll become Mrs. Marshall. She’s not at all like other girls, Monty. Pat’s got brains. A crackerjack stenographer and bookkeeper. Got a man-sized job with the Consolidated Grain and Milling Company in the city. You may have heard of them.”
“Sure,” said Monty. “Sent there once for some oil cakes to winter my she stock on. Costs too much, though. A cow ain’t worth what it costs to feed one through the winter. What about this feller yuh run off?”
Gary got up and began helping with the supper while he told all about James Blaine Hawkins and his AGREEMENT OF CONTRACT.
Monty was in the position of a man who dips into the middle of a story and finds it something of a jumble because he does not know what went before. He asked a good many questions, so that the telling lasted through supper and the dishwashing afterwards. By the time they were ready to sit down and smoke with the comfortable assurance that further exertion would not be necessary that night, Monty was pretty well up-to-date on the affairs of Gary Marshall and Patricia Connolly, up to and including the arrival of James Blaine Hawkins at Johnnywater and his hurried departure that morning.
“And yuh-all say the feller seen something,” Monty drawled meditatively after a minute or two of silence. “Did he tell yuh what it was he saw?”
“No, except that he thought it was a man who had slipped into the cabin when he wasn’t looking. But it was the cat that really put him on the run. Seems he hated to see a cat unless I saw it too.”
Monty looked up quickly. In Gary’s tone he had caught a certain reluctance to speak of the man which James Blaine Hawkins declared he saw. He was willing enough to explain all about James Blaine Hawkins and the cat, and he had laughed when he told how he had pretended not to hear the Voice. But of the possible apparition of a man Gary did not like to talk.