A little distance away the cat had curled herself down in a tiny hollow at the edge of the slide. Gary made his way over to her. She opened one eye and regarded him sleepily, gave a lazy purr or two and settled herself again more comfortably. Gary saw, from certain small scratchings in the gravel, that the pinto cat had made this little nest for herself. She had not been hunting at all. She had come to a spot with which she was very familiar.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE PAT CONNOLLY MINE
Gary decided offhand that he had been neatly sold. He sat down on the loose rubble near Faith and made himself a smoke. The grove and the cabin were hidden from him by the narrow little ridge that looked perfectly smooth from the cañon bottom. But the rest of the cañon—the corral, the potato patch, the alfalfa—lay blocked out in miniature far below him. He stared down upon the peaceful picture it made and wondered why he had climbed all the way up here just following the pinto cat. For the matter of that, his following the cat was not half so purposeless as the cat’s coming had been.
He looked down at her curled asleep in her little hollow. It struck him that this must have been her destination each time she crossed the creek and started up the bluff. But why should the cat come away up here every day? Gary did not attempt to explain the vagaries of a cat so eccentric as Faith had proved herself to be. He wondered idly if he were becoming eccentric also, just from constant association with Faith.
He laughed a little to himself and picked up a piece of malapi rock; balanced it in his hand while he thought of other things, and tossed it down the slide. It landed ten feet below him and began rolling farther, carrying with it a small avalanche of loose rocks. Gary watched the slide with languid interest. Even so small a thing could make a tiny ripple in the dead calm of the cañon that day.
The slide started by that one rock spread farther. Other rocks loosened and went rolling down the bluff, and Gary’s eyes followed them and went higher, watching to see where next a rock would slip away from the mass and go rolling down. It seemed to him that the whole slide might be easily set in motion with no more than a kick or two at the top. He got up and began to experiment, kicking a rock loose here and there. There was no danger to himself, since he stood at the top of the slide. As for Faith, she had sprung up in a furry arch at the first slithering clatter and was now viewing the scene with extreme disfavor from the secure vantage point of a shelf on the ledge above Gary.
In a very few minutes Gary had set the whole surface of the slide in motion. The noise it made pleased him immensely. It served to break that waiting silence in the cañon. When the rocks ceased rolling, he started others. Finally he found himself standing upon firm ground again, with an outcropping of gray quartz just below him. His eyes fixed themselves upon the quartz in a steady stare before he dug heels into the slope and edged down to it.
With a malapi rock bigger than his two fists he hammered off a piece of quartz and held it in the shade of his body while he examined it closely. He turned it this way and that, fearful of deceiving himself by the very strength of his desire. But all the while he knew what were those little yellow specks that gleamed in the shade.
He knelt and pounded off other pieces of the quartz and compared them anxiously with the first. They were all identical in character: steel gray, with here and there the specks of gold in the gray, and the chocolate brown streaks and splotches of hematite—the “red oxide” iron which runs as high as seventy per cent. iron. Hematite and free gold in gray quartz——
“A prettier combination for free gold I couldn’t have made to order!” he whispered, almost as if he were praying. “It’s good enough for my girl’s ‘million-dollar mine’—though they do get rich off a piece of gold float in the movies!” He began to laugh nervously. A weaker-souled man would probably have wept instead.