The voice at Johnnywater

by B. M. Bower

Gary turned and tilted the pan, tenderly as a young mother cradles her first-born. He dipped and rocked and spilled the water carefully over the rim; dipped and rocked and tilted again. The three deep creases stood between his straight, dark eyebrows, but now they betokened eager concentration upon his work. At last, he poured clear water from the pan carefully, almost drop by drop. He tilted the pan slowly in the sunlight and bent his head, peering sharply into the pan. His heart seemed to be beating in his throat when he saw the trail of tiny yellow particles following sluggishly the spoonful of black sand when he tilted the pan.

“I’ve got it, Steve,” he exclaimed, looking up over his shoulder. He caught his breath in the sudden realization that he was looking into the empty sunlight. Absorbed as he had been in the gold, the felt presence of Steve Carson looking over his shoulder had seemed perfectly natural and altogether real.

The momentary shock sobered him. But the old dread of that felt presence no longer assailed him as something he must combat by feigning unconsciousness. The unreasoning impression that Steve Carson—the mind of him—was there just behind his shoulder, watching and sharing in his delight, persisted nevertheless. Gary caught himself wondering if the thing was really only a prank of his imagination. Feeling a bit foolish, but choosing to indulge the whimsy, he stood up and turned deliberately, the pan held out before him.

“Steve Carson, if dead people go on living and thinking, and if you really are hanging around just out of sight but watching the game, I’m here to say that I hope you’re glad I found this vein. And I want to tell you right now that if there’s any money to be made out of it, it’s going to the finest, squarest little girl in the world. So if there is such a thing as a spirit, just take it from me everything’s going to be on the square.”

He carried the pan up to the cabin and carefully rinsed the gold down into a jelly glass. He made no apology to himself for the little speech to a man dead and gone these five years. Having made himself as clear on the subject as was diplomatic—supposing Steve Carson’s spirit had been present and could hear—he felt a certain relief and could lay the subject aside and devote himself to the fascination of hunting the gold out of the hills where it had lain buried for ages.

It occurred to him that he might find some particularly rich specimens, mortar them by hand and pan them for Patricia. A wedding ring made from the first gold taken and panned by hand—the hand of Gary Marshall—from “The Pat Connolly” mine, appealed to him irresistibly. Before he had mortared a lump of porphyry the size of a pigeon’s egg, Gary had resolved to pan enough gold for that very purpose. He pictured himself pulling the ring from his vest pocket while the minister waited. He experienced a prophetic thrill of ecstasy when he slipped the ring upon Patricia’s finger. The dreamed sentence, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” intoned by an imaginary minister, thrilled him to the soul.

Pung, pung, pung! It wouldn’t take so very long, if he mortared rock evenings, say, instead of killing time minute by minute playing solitaire with the deck of cards Waddell had thumbed before him. Pung, pung, pung! He could mortar the quartz in the evenings and pan it in the morning before he went to work. Pung, pung, pung, pung! He would hunt up a cow’s horn and fix it as he had seen old prospectors do, so that he could blow the sand from the panned gold and carry it unmixed to the jeweler. Pung, pung! The porphyry sample was fine as corn meal under the miniature stamp-mill of Gary’s pounding.

He was mighty careful of that handful of pulp. He even dipped the mortar half full of water and sloshed it round and round, pouring it afterward into the pan to rinse out what gold may have stuck to the iron. His finger tips stirred the wet mass caressingly in the pan, muddying the water with the waste matter and pouring that out before he squatted on his heels at the edge of the stream.

The result was gratifying in the extreme. Granting that the values were inclined to “jump” from quartz to porphyry and back again to the quartz, he would still lose none of the gold. He tried to be very conservative in estimating the probable value of the vein. He knew that, granting quartz and porphyry were in place from the surface downward, the values should increase with depth. It would take some digging, however, to determine that point. He was glad that Patricia knew nothing at all about it. If there were to be disappointment later on, he wanted to bear it alone. The joys of success he was perfectly willing to share; but not the sickening certitude of failure. He judged that the outcropping would run several hundred dollars to the ton, provided his panned samples had run a fair average of the vein.

Material for air castles aplenty, that! Gary was afraid to believe it. He kept warning himself headily that the world would be peopled entirely with multimillionaires if every man’s dream of wealth came true and every man’s hopes were realized.