“I’d say that Injun was about due to check out, anyway,” he told Faith, who was nosing a crack that probably held a rat or two. “Now I see how it’s done, the Voice isn’t half so mysterious or spookish as all that giant powder right on hand where I need it. Don’t even have to pack it up the bluff. And that’s Providence, I’ll tell the cock-eyed world! When I think how I chased that supernatural Voice all over the bluff and then sat and shivered in the cabin because I couldn’t find it—Faith, I should think you might have told me! You can’t kid me into believing you weren’t wise all the while. You know a heap more than you let on. You can’t string me.”
He made his way back to the cave and examined more carefully the giant powder cached there. He cut a foot length of fuse, lighted and timed it with his watch. The fuse burned with almost perfect accuracy—a minute to the foot. Then he capped a two-foot length, broke a stick of powder in two, carefully inserted the cap in the dynamite and went out and laid it under a bowlder the size of a half-barrel. He scraped loose dirt over it, split the fuse end back an inch, “spitted” it with his cigarette and ducked into the cave with his watch in his hand to await the result.
The explosion lifted the bowlder, and broke it in three pieces, and Gary felt that the experiment had been a success. The powder would probably miss fire occasionally, since it was crystallized with age. It might also explode when he least expected it to do so, but Gary was prepared to take that risk; though many an old miner would have refused profanely to touch the stuff.
“Well, I used to take a chance on breaking my neck every time I put over a stunt before the camera,” he mused. “That was just to hold down a job. I ought to be dead willing to take a chance with this junk when it means millions for my girl—maybe.”
With explosives enough to last him a couple of months at the very least, Gary felt that Fate was giving him a broad smile of encouragement. He acknowledged to himself, while he mortared rich pieces of porphyry and quartz that night, the growing belief that he had been all wrong in blaming Patricia for making the investment. It was, he was beginning to think, the whispering of Destiny that had urged Patricia to buy Johnnywater in the first place; and it was Destiny again at work that had pushed him out of pictures and over here to work out the plan.
Perhaps he did not reduce the thought to so definite a form, but that was the substance of his speculations.
So he dreamed and worked with untiring energy through the days, dreamed and pulped gold-bearing rock for the wedding ring during the evenings when he should have been resting, and slept like a tired baby at night. Whenever he heard the Voice shouting from the bluff, he shrugged his shoulders and grinned at the joke the wind was trying to play. Whenever he felt that unseen presence beside him, if he did not grin he at least accepted it with a certain sense of friendly companionship. And the spotted cat, Faith, was always close, like a pet dog.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“STEVE CARSON—POOR DEVIL!”
Gary went down ten feet at an incline so sharp he could not carry the muck up in the buckets he had expected to use for the purpose. He knew, because he spent two perspiring hours in the attempt. Could he have done it, it would have been slow, toilsome work. But at least he could have gone down. He would not take the time to experiment with a ladder. To carry the necessary material up the bluff and build a thing would consume the best part of a day, and the richness of the vein bred impatience that could not brook delay.
He therefore decided to crosscut on the side where the vein showed the highest values and continue throwing out the muck. It would be slow, but Gary was thankful that he could make headway working by himself. So he drilled a round of holes in the left wall of the shaft, with the quartz and porphyry in the center of the face of the proposed crosscut. The vein on that side was wider, and the values were fully as high as on the other. He was pleased with his plan and tried to remember all he had learned about mining, so that he would waste neither time, effort, nor ore.