Monty was standing at the very edge of a narrow mound of earth that still bore the marks of a shovel where the mound had been smoothed and patted into symmetrical form. A grave, the length of a man.
Here again were the blurred footprints in the loose soil. Who had made them, what lay buried beneath that narrow ridge of heaped sand, Monty shrank from conjecturing.
With an involuntary movement, of which Monty was wholly unconscious, his right hand went up to his hat brim. He stood there for a space without moving. Then he turned and almost ran to the corral. It was not until he reached to open the gate that Monty discovered his hat in his hand.
He was thinking swiftly now, holding his thoughts rigidly to the details of what he must do. The name Hawkins obtruded itself frequently upon his mind, but he pushed the thought of Hawkins from him. Beyond the details of his own part, which he knew he must play unfalteringly from now on, he would not think—he could not bear to think. He saddled Jazz, mounted and led his own horse down to the cabin. Working swiftly, he packed a few blankets, food for three days and his own refilled canteens upon the led horse.
Then with a last shrinking glance around the cañon walls, he mounted Jazz. He remembered then something that he must do, something that Gary would wish to have him do. He rode back to the stone pen and opened the gate so that the pigs could run free and look after themselves.
He remounted, then half-turned in the saddle and took up the slack in the lead rope, got the led horse straightened out behind him and kicked Jazz into a trot. In his mental stress he loped the horses all the way down to the cañon’s mouth. And then, striking into the dim trail, he went racking away over the small ridges and into the hollows, heading straight for the road most likely to be traveled in this big, empty land; the road that stretched its long, long miles between Goldfield and Las Vegas.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
GARY FOLLOWS THE PINTO CAT
Gary had prospected pretty thoroughly the whole cañon, following the theory that some one—he felt that it was probably Steve Carson—had carried that rich, gold-bearing rock down to the cabin. Waddell had left neither chemicals nor appliances by which he could test any of the mineralized rock he found; but Gary was looking for one particular kind, the porphyry that carried free gold.
Greater than the loneliness, stronger than his dread of the cañon and the cabin, was his desire to find more of that gold-bearing rock. It would not take much of it to make Pat’s investment in Johnnywater more than profitable. He even climbed to the top of the butte—a heart-breaking effort accomplished at the risk of his neck on the sheer wall of the rim rock. There was no means of knowing just where that porphyry had come from. In some prehistoric eruption it might have been thrown for miles, though Gary did not believe that it had been. The top of the bluff gave no clue whatever. Malapi bowlders strewed much of the surface with outcroppings of country rock. Certainly there was no sign of mineral up there. He tramped the butte for miles, however, and spent two days in doing it. Then, satisfied that the porphyry must be somewhere in the cañon, he renewed his search on the slope.
Prospecting here was quite as difficult, because so much of the upper slopes was covered with an overburden of the malapi that formed the rim rock. Portions of the rim would break and slide when the storms beat upon it. Considerable areas of loose rock had formed during the centuries of wear and tear, and if there had been mineral outcroppings they were as effectually hidden as if they had never come to the surface at all. But a strain of persistence which Gary had inherited from pioneering forebears held him somewhat doggedly to the search.