The voice at Johnnywater

by B. M. Bower

Gary worked for three days, following the quartz and porphyry down at an incline of forty-five degrees. The vein held true to form, and the samples he panned each morning never failed to show a drag of gold after the concentrate. It was killing work for a man unused to pick and shovel. In the afternoon of the third day even Gary’s driving energy began to slow down. He had learned how to drill and shoot in rock, but the steady swing of the four-pound hammer (miners call them single-jacks) lamed his right arm so that he could not strike a forceful blow. Moreover, he discovered that twisting a drill in rock is not soothing to broken blisters. So, much as he wanted to make Patricia rich in the shortest possible time, protesting flesh prevailed upon him to knock off work for the time being.

He was sitting on the edge of what would one day be an incline shaft—when he had dug it deep enough—inspecting his blistered hands. After several days of quiet the wind began to blow in gusts from off the butte. Somewhere behind Gary and above him there came a bellowing halloo that made him jump and slide into the open cut. Again and again came the bellow above him—and after his first astonishment Gary’s mouth relaxed into a slow grin.

“I’ll bet right there’s the makings of that spook Voice!” he said aloud. “Up there in the rim rock somewhere.”

He climbed out of the cut and stood facing the cliff, listening. At close quarters the call became a bellow with only a faint resemblance to a Voice shouting hello. He remembered now that on that first morning when he had searched for the elusive “man” on the bluff, the wind had died before he had climbed very high. After that he had not heard the Voice again that day.

He made his way laboriously up to the rim rock, listening always to locate the exact source of the sound. The bluff was almost perpendicular just under the rim, and huge bowlders lay where they had fallen in some forgotten time from the top. Gary scrambled over the first of these and confronted a narrow aperture which seemed to lead back into the cliff. The opening was perhaps three feet wide at the bottom, drawing in to a pointed roof a few feet above his head.

The Voice did not seem to come from this opening, but Gary’s curiosity was roused. He went into the cave. Fifteen feet, as he paced the distance, brought him to the rear wall—and to a small recess where a couple of boxes sat side by side with a three-pound coffee can on top and a bundle wrapped in canvas. Gary forgot the Voice for the time being and began to investigate the cache.

It was perfectly simple; perfectly amazing also. The boxes had been opened, probably in order to carry the contents more easily up the bluff; the most ambitious man would scarcely want to make that climb with a fifty-pound box of dynamite on his shoulder. But both boxes were full, or so nearly full that the few missing sticks did not matter. The coffee can contained six boxes of caps, and in the canvas bundle were eight full coils of fuse.

“Golly grandma, if this ain’t movie luck!” Gary jubilated to the cat, which had tagged him into the cave. “Or it would be if the dynamite were fresh. From the weird tales I’ve heard about men who got fresh with stale dynamite and landed in fragments before a horrified audience, Handsome Gary’s liable to lose his profile if he doesn’t watch his step. But it’s giant powder, and if it will shoot at all, I’ve simply got to use it. It’s just about as necessary a prop in this scene as a rope is in a lynching bee. Well, now we’ll go ketchum that Voice.”

By dint of hard climbing he made his way higher, to where the ledge seemed broken in splintered clefts above the slide. As he went, the Voice bellowed at him with a rising tone which distance might easily modify to a human cry. Even so close, he was some time in discovering just how the sound was made. But at last, after much listening and investigating the splintered slits, he caught the rush of wind up through a series of small, chimneylike openings. Here, then, was the Voice that had given Johnnywater Cañon so weird a reputation.

As to the appearance of the Voice just after Steve Carson’s disappearance, Gary considered that an exaggeration, unconscious, perhaps, but nevertheless born of superstitious fear. Steve Carson might have told a different story could he have been questioned about the sound.